Approaching sanity

(If you received this blog by email, you might want to visit the actual site. The pictures work much better there. 

Just click on the title “Approaching sanity”)

Evening light on the Colorado River above Moab

All summer, I’ve been expecting to write a blog about the trip I just took—a hiking adventure in Capitol Reef, a lesser-known national park in Southern Utah. I’ve written before about how much I love this corner of the world—I even referred to it as “the center of the cosmos.” Capitol Reef is a distinctive place relative to, say, Arches and Canyonlands—more lush, with the Fremont River at its center, higher in elevation, making for cooler temperatures overall, and more remote. The closest “city,” Green River (pop ~1000), is about 100 miles away. I hadn’t been to Capitol Reef for years, and my wish to hike the Frying Pan Canyon trail, a favorite walk there, was one incentive for the “return to fitness” program that framed much of my summer. If you missed that part of the story, I spent an uncharacteristically sedentary winter recovering, gently, from some late summer knee and hip crises. The lack of activity was bad for me, body and mind. So my summer project was to regain the physical well-being that has been a central part of my life—and I wasn't certain that I'd be able to do that, aging being what it is. So, not too surprisingly, the blog I expected to be a rousing celebration of my big hike became something else as well—a reflection on the slow arrival of acceptance, the (sorely belated) ability to, as the Beatles urged, let it be.

Cliffs and cottonwood along the
Fremont River entering Capitol Reef

The rounded sandstone formations that give
"Capitol Reef" its name

Not that the trip wasn’t blog-worthy in its own right. The soft evening light on the Colorado River above Moab, the deep morning shade contrasting with the sunlight glancing off the red rock formations along Wall Street trail in Arches, the early-fall light on the cliffs entering Capitol Reef, the cottonwoods slowly turning golden, and the vast expanses of the San Rafael Swell and the Water Pocket Fold, grand geology on display. It felt perfect for this hike, which had been in my plans for months. And the walk itself was, as I'd recalled, wonderfully varied and welcoming and gorgeous.

Chimney Rock. A day-before-the-big-hike
walk took me to the plateau above this spire

In concrete terms, my aim on this trip was to hike from the campground at Capitol Reef up into and then through Cohab Canyon (so named, legend has it, because early Mormons who “cohatited”—i.e., lived in polygamous families—retreated to this high, hidden canyon when the feds came calling), climb out of Cohab and drop into Frying Pan Canyon (so named, according to local stories, because the very exposed trail gets so hot), and finally out of Frying Pan and across the slickrock plateau to Cassidy Arch (named for Butch Cassidy, who hung out in these parts with his pal, the Sundance Kid).

Overlooking the Water Pocket Fold,
a vast monocline that gave white settlers fits

At a more profound (and less visible) level, my aim was to be capable of taking a long hike in the desert I love, on a trail I that remembered as gorgeous but that I hadn’t hiked for years—and, most importantly, to do that feeling strong and relaxed enough to genuinely enjoy the walk. I had prepared for that all summer, following a remarkably (for me) sane and flexible exercise plan. And now I'd see how well it paid off, what limits remain even after all that.

The weathered Navajo sandstone walls of Cohab Canyon

Looking back down into Cohab

The summer produced many small pleasures on my way back to hikability. Interestingly (to me), none of them had to do with pushing through exhaustion or enduring painful exercise, as would have been my tendency earlier in life. Instead, they came from backing off when pain suggested a problem, turning back from a long walk when a bee sting threatened an allergic reaction or thunder signaled lightening nearby, accepting with equanimity the unavoidable schedule changes that spoiled my workout plans. I told myself, many times, “Don’t be stupid, Janis”—and I stopped the painful exercise on the spot, let go of the anxiety about the abandoned workout, and traded a planned walk for access to my epipen or to shelter from the lightening. And, remarkably (to me, at least) I felt fine about these moments, totally content. Maybe even wise. 

This sense of peace was entirely a matter of perspective. For reasons I don’t fully understand, I found myself not obsessing over these things but calmly aware that what I wanted was to be fit enough to enjoy a hike like the one I had planned. I wasn’t trying to show off, to be best at anything. Achieving this specific weight room success, making it to that aerobics class, or completing a particular walk didn’t really matter. What I cared about was the slow, gradual progress toward being well again.

A local goblin on the plateau beyond Frying Pan Canyon

The final experience that confirmed my tectonic shift in attitude came on the day of my long-planned hyper-hike, when I faced a moment that would have seemed intolerable in years past: I actually couldn’t find the trail junction that would take me to the end-point of the hike I had planned, Cassidy Arch. I hunted for the junction for a long time, walking hither and yon, up and down, until I realized I was getting dangerously tired for someone with a serious return hike yet to come. I said to myself, “Don’t be stupid, Janis.” And I started the long trek back to the trailhead where I started. I had done what I set out to do—had a wonderful, long hike in the desert I love. I’d walked far enough to have reached the end-goal arch (and then some)—just not entirely in the right direction. And I got back to my car feeling happy and strong, satisfyingly tired. Exactly what I had hoped for to close the summer. Sure, I was a bit disappointed (I really wanted a picture of Cassidy Arch), but it was really fine. My summer is happily complete.

Morning sunlight along the Wall Street trail in Arches,
where I was welcomed by the cascading song of a canyon wren

I don’t quite know how to explain the transformation I’m trying to describe here, from super-jock intensity (out to prove something?) to this delightful acceptance of the limits imposed by reality. I think it was  at least partly this: The very real possibility of not ever being able to take such a hike again seriously heightened my awareness of my age and of the realities of my aging body. That insistent striving for more (even for excess) that seemed so important earlier in my life suddenly looked so pointless when I was faced with losing so much. As I drove through Southern Utah, everyday sights—familiar rock formations, ordinary plants, simple ripples in the stream—were suddenly strikingly beautiful. When I took a short walk early one morning in Arches and heard a canyon wren, a tear sprung to my eye. I threw out my arms and sighed at the sheer, deep pleasure of just being there. “There,” where I hadn’t been sure I'd be able to go again. One night, I lay on my back gazing up at the Milky Way and saw a shooting star course across the desert sky; my heart smiled ear to ear. Those experiences were somehow linked directly to this new level of acceptance, this shift in perspective that I sometimes dare to call “wisdom.” Grandiose, maybe, but closer to “wise” than I’ve been in my past, for sure.

Being sufficiently old and physically compromised to contemplate the loss of things that are so valuable to me—my physicality and my access to wilderness—granted me a new perspective. A canyon wren makes my heart sing, and missing a long-awaited trail junction at the end of a very long hike is of no import. Huge and tiny are so relative as to be meaningless. Now that’s a lesson in perspective.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Retirement risks and highway metaphors

You’ve probably noticed that summer is sliding toward fall. The kids are back in school, the leaves are starting to turn, the sorrel is head high, and last spring's yucca blooms have been transformed to drying pods. And I’m content. I’ve had a marvelous summer. Several good trips and a bunch of other fun events contributed to that. And as a bonus, I’ve had a most successful “return to fitness” campaign, and I’m feeling healthy and strong—and very happy about that. Reflecting on this process has helped me articulate something about the mixed joys and pitfalls of retirement—and some life lessons about the balance between ease and commitment.

Obviously, one of the real pleasure of being retired, as anyone craving the moment when they’ll retire might imagine, is the luxury of pretty much setting my own schedule. My days are busy, but my schedule is flexible and elastic, remarkably free of coercive scheduling. There are exceptions, of course—doctor’s appointments, trash pick-up, meetings, and other events scheduled by or with someone else. But mostly, I get to shape my days as I'd like them to be.

This sounds lovely—and it is—but it has its costs. One of those, oddly, is trouble finding time to do things I want to do. The problem is that the wide-openness of my schedule allows me to not actively think about setting aside time for things that aren’t obligatory. I have to do my online editing work at some point each day, and I have to do assorted life-maintenance chores at times. So I plan time around getting those things done. But then there are the things that I don’t have to do, but I intend to do. Like getting some exercise every day. This is where the ease of my retirement un-schedule trips me up. The tasks that live in intention get set aside. The day slips away, and somehow, I didn’t have time for those things.

So several things contributed to my getting seriously on track this summer—and I’m hoping it’s for the long haul. First, my fall orthopedic crisis made me inactive through the winter, and I paid the price—in energy level, mood, strength, and general engagement in my life (the scarcity of blog entries being one indication of this disengagement). That was a wake-up call.

Then, a planned spring trip to Southern Utah promised an opportunity to see a part of red rock country I haven’t visited for years. As it turned out, we didn’t make precisely that trip, but thinking about it brought to mind a trail there that I really want to walk again. And with that thought, I had to acknowledge that I was nowhere near fit enough to do it and enjoy the experience.

The final nudge came from a bit of wisdom circulated on a listserve I read regularly. It’s nominally for psychologists and largely about psych topics, but the moderator also interweaves other interesting themes—special needs animals, Buddhism, feminism, racism, and—apropos of my point here—health and fitness. This particular post offered fitness tips. Now, I know that there are zillions of lists and fitness experts offering “10 tips for getting fit,” and these were probably no more or less wise than all the others. But the timing was just right, and two of these ideas really stuck with me. In my mental shorthand, these are “no exit ramps” and “merge with traffic.”

The first is pretty self-explanatory, familiar to anyone who’s tried to stay focused on any challenging goal: don’t give yourself excuses, or you’ll be off the track for sure. The second was more of a surprise to me. It has to do with living in the real world and avoiding extreme, excessive, impossible rules, “merging” with the flow of realistic demands of the moment—an out-of-town trip, a task that genuinely erases time for anything else, fatigue that seems to require a break, extended time spent with someone important. Gently merging with these moments can save your sanity and honor your relationships.

Now, I recognize that item 2 seems to contradict item 1: isn’t merging sort of like an exit ramp? I’ve found that it’s not, as long as I’m really conscious about it: “OK, this (whatever) isn’t perfect for my plan, but it’s important/delightful right now, so I’m going with it. It’s not an exit ramp. I’m merging, not getting off the road. In the next moment, I’m back on track.”

Probably the key to all of this was managing that pesky scheduling-in-retirement thing. I had to override my automatic cruise setting and actually, intentionally plan to get some serious exercise every day. I had to prioritize my efforts at returning to a state of physical well-being that I’d let slide. And I’ve been happily, remarkably consistent in this: I make time for my activity of the day, and then I schedule other things (the ones under my control, that is) around that. No letting it slide, thinking I’ll get to it “later.” Yup, I’ve missed a few days (see “merge with traffic”), but it was a conscious decision to do so, not a struggle over whether I was sabotaging my goal. I named it as merging with traffic, and I never doubted that when circumstances were appropriate again, I’d still be on the same path, not having taken an exit ramp.

I suspect there are valuable life lessons here—not that being healthy isn’t sufficient in its own right. For me, the message of my successful summer has to do with keeping some perspective on time and structure, on the interplay between responsibility and ease, and on the tricky line (at least for me) between clear commitment and obsessive adherence. Accommodating both sides of those dichotomies/dimensions is no easy task—whether in a fitness plan or an overall life plan.

I wonder, if I worked on that balance in all realms of my life, how truly healthy could I be?

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Deletion and erasure

Writing entries for this blog, I sometimes bump up against this imaginary, but somehow very weighty, line between what’s appropriately “open” as I explore my experiences of retirement, aging, and life in general and what’s “too personal.” In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking about a topic that hangs right close to that line, making me hesitant to discuss it here. But it seems important as part of the complexity of life as I get old, so here I go. It’s about death. Not death in general, but the death of someone who holds a singular place in my life, and about questions her dying has raised that haven’t been raised in the same way by earlier losses. 

One of our trips this summer was to a memorial service, a “celebration of life,” for one of my sisters. She had died in January after a long decline from a head injury, so her death was not a surprise. But it was, as these things tend to be, a shock nevertheless. She lived in Oregon, and we hadn’t been particularly close, but we had kept in touch over the years—mostly by email, often sharing political rants. I had visited her last November, knowing it would likely be the last time we talked. So it was some time after her death when gathered with other family members last month to scatter her ashes in the ocean off Ecola Beach, her favorite stretch of the Oregon coast. The wind made it impossible to cast them out over the ocean, so we took turns tipping her ashes from the container into a little inlet so that they would wash into the sea.

Just after we got home from that trip, I received a reminder email from an e-card company that my sister’s birthday was coming up. This reminder would usually trigger a rather casual process of finding an appropriate card and crafting a birthday message. In earlier years, when she was still communicative, I’d likely have sent her an email, too. If it was a “major” birthday, I might have sent flowers. But this time, it was different—and not just because I wouldn’t be sending the card. Seeing her name in that email stopped me in my tracks. I was stunned, paralyzed for a moment. The message offered me the option to “remove this reminder” for future years. Staring at the screen, I thought of a column I had very recently read called “My Digital Cemetery.”

The column I was recalling talks about the dilemma of how to manage digital “contacts” when someone dies. It’s a thought-provoking piece, which I recommend, not because it has answers, but because it so makes you think about the meaning of identities and of relationships—and of what happens to those entities when someone dies. It’s couched in digital terms, but the questions are far squishier than the title suggests. When I first read it, I set it aside, thinking I might blog about it at some point.

Now, seeing my sister’s name and being offered the option to delete it, I noticed my internal monologue. How could I remove her name, remove her from this list? That would imply … acknowledge … that she isn’t any longer. But why not remove it? There is no logical point in continuing to be reminded of a birthday that isn’t any longer. Besides, I don’t really need reminders of her presence in my life (for all of my life). With no digital record of their existence, I still feel a twinge when I see or hear the birthdate of other family members who’ve died (and there are now four).

I went back to the article, hoping it would help me think this through. The author, Rob Walker, a tech writer for the New York Times, talks about the names in his digital files as a catalog not only of contacts but of his personal history. Each name, he says, is a reminder of a person, a relationship, experiences that collectively make up his own past. He admits that he does occasionally delete names—but never those of people who have died. He attributes this to the sense that erasing those names would be participating in the impression that they were gone, whereas in truth, they live on as part of his own history. “What I’ve lost is part of who I am,” he writes. “So is what I choose to save.”

But here’s what still puzzles me: Why, then, is it easier to erase the names of people who are still alive? They, too, have contributed to who I am, what I have experienced. They, too, are part of my history. It must be that death changes the meaning of these markers of someone’s (prior) existence by adding the reality of their (current) non-existence. It’s the simultaneous realization of both states of being that is so troubling, that makes the reminders startling in the short term and twinge-inducing as time goes on.

She’s gone, I say to myself, so why not delete her contact information? It serves no purpose. But, I reply, what does it mean if I do remove it? But if coming across her name occasionally makes me sad, then why would I want to keep it in my list? Or do I need to feel sad? Is that very sadness, the shock or twinge, such an appropriate response to loss that trying to avoid it amounts to negating the importance of relationships? Maybe this is the difference between deleting living and deleting dead contacts: coming across the names of still-living people doesn’t usually elicit great sadness, so deleting them isn’t an act of avoidance. But coming across the names of people who have died can cause a sense of great existential loss—the awareness of something deeply, finally, and irretrievably gone. And that feeling keeps alive the duality of loss and life, allowing us to live with relationships that have ended. Deleting those names amounts to erasing the possibility of moments like the one I experienced, moments that keep present the truth of a now-gone relationship.

I know that plenty of philosophers have explored this existential moment—I did the requisite stint as an avid existentialist in college. I also know that authors, poets, playwrights, musicians, artists, and spiritual teachers have mined this moment in far greater depth than I ever will. But oddly, none of that prepared me for the particular, peculiar moment when I saw my sister’s name, Judy, and was asked whether I wanted to delete it.

I have no answers here. Just musings. And Judy’s contact information, still in my phone.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Psychology loses its bearings

We just got back from Toronto, where we attended the annual convention of the American Psychological Association (APA). I’ve written about this conference before—sometimes about the interesting sessions I attended, and sometimes about personal lessons I gleaned from my time there. The site was lovely—Toronto is a beautiful city and our hotel overlooked Lake Ontario. 

But this year’s conference was a different sort of experience from most APA conventions because APA has been in the news big time—and not happily so. In case you’ve missed the nasty business that has rocked APA to its core—and with it, potentially, the field of psychology for some time to come—let me offer the Cliff Notes on a scandal.

As you know, since 9/11, this country has been absorbed with concerns about safety, security, danger, risk—the whole package that comes with such a terrifying and disorienting event, especially when the understandable fear is fanned by policies that magnify the threat of “terror.” Among those have been the detention and “enhanced interrogation” of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo and so-called “black sites” elsewhere around the world. We now know that some of those interrogations involved what has come to be acknowledged, even by some of Bush’s cronies, as torture. Obama ended the most egregious practices shortly after he entered office (although some folks argue that unethical practices persist, even under his government). 

Enter psychology. Nearly all major health care and mental health organizations—professional organizations representing doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, social workers, and others—actively, publicly repudiated these practices and prohibited their members from participating in them, invoking the historic bottom-line absolute dictum of healthcare providers, “First, do no harm.”

I say “nearly all” such organizations because psychology’s largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association (APA)—my professional organization—failed to issue such a prohibition. Instead, when challenged, APA conducted “thorough reviews” that found nothing amiss. They established a committee to review the Association’s relevant ethics policy, and then insisted that all was well.

Still, lots of folks were unconvinced. For over a decade, some members of APA have tried to call APA to task for this ethical violation. They have been ignored, maligned, and subjected to personal attack. They persisted anyway, and finally got the attention of prize-winning author James Risen. His book, Pay Any Price: Greed,Power and Endless War, specifically identified the role of psychologists in enhanced interrogation. The media scrum that followed finally forced APA to commission an independent report—with dramatic and disturbing results.  

 

A quote from that report: “The evidence supports the conclusion that APA officials colluded with DoD [the Department of Defense] officials to, at the least, adopt and maintain APA ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that key DoD officials wanted. . . . APA chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping DoD, managing its P.R., and maximizing the growth of the profession.” The report also highlighted internal problems—insular governance, failure to attend to critics, insistence on allegiance, and so on—that point to systemic failures.

So, this recent conference of APA happened smack in the wake of the independent report and all the publicity it generated (for examples, look here, here, here, here, and here). I went to the conference every bit as much to see what it “felt” like as to go to informational sessions. How would people be, I wondered—preoccupied, indifferent, ambivalent, anxious, angry, defensive? Would they talk about this crisis or just do their usual work, as if it weren’t in the air? The answer was, not surprisingly, all of the above. In some circumstances, people went about their business as if nothing were amiss. But it was always easy to engage people in conversation about this situation. No one I spoke with was unaware of it (though that observation may be biased by the company I keep) or hesitated to talk about it.

On Friday, several days into the meetings, the elected representatives passed a resolution clearly prohibiting the participation of psychologists in military interrogations. The details of the resolution matched the hopes that had long been expressed by the group who had pursued this issue so vehemently. Most members (and likely, most in governance) heaved a collective sigh of relief. Now, it seemed, we could get down to the business of cleaning up the mess. A few folks were unhappy, especially some military psychologists, but most seemed proud of the decision … as if we had made it personally.

One friend, knowing that I had resigned from APA several years ago over this very issue, asked if I felt vindicated. I said I didn’t because I didn’t actively do anything other than withhold my dues, instead leaving the active protesting to others. “Vindicated” should apply to the rather small group of folks who were active in their dissent, who repeatedly distributed information to the governing bodies—information that those in governance chose to disregard or discredit—and finally raised enough awareness to expose the truth. I did feel betrayed, angry—and at the same time relieved that this truth finally saw the light of day. I was also worried, fearing that psychologists' genuine, positive work may have suffered a damaging blow. And I felt a bit hopeful that maybe, just maybe, this would be a turning point. And I was a bit skeptical as well, not daring to believe that so many problems could be managed without a major upheaval.

With all of that in mind, I attended the “town meeting” scheduled for open discussion of the report and the way forward for APA. (You can read about that meeting and prior teach-ins here.) Projected on screens at the front of the very large hall was a word cloud showing the words that people had used to describe their reaction to the report, with larger lettering indicating more uses of a particular word. Here’s what those screens looked like:

Sitting between two such screens were the past president of APA and next year’s president (the current president didn’t participate, as he was mentioned in the report). I can only imagine how uncomfortable these two women must have felt. They began with an apology to APA members, on behalf of all of those who had been involved in governance over the years, for the actions and inaction identified in the report. One of them borrowed a quote from Warren Buffet: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to destroy it." Psychology has been building its reputation for about 135 years now, and it was mightily damaged, if not destroyed, in a decade. The facilitators' comments suggested that folks had spent a lot of time and psychic energy trying to begin healing the damage, envisioning a way forward.

The discussion that followed was very civil throughout, though it included both “dissenters” (the title they prefer for their group) and military psychologists, both current members of governance and people who (like me) had left APA over this, both long-time APA members and graduate students just entering the profession. The facilitators were informative, open, and surprisingly non-defensive. The discussion lasted for almost two hours, and only a little of it seemed redundant.

I left feeling more upbeat, if cautious. If these two women, the former and future presidents, roughly represent the commitment of others, then there may be hope. Among the goals they committed to, in addition to an end to psychologists’ involvement in torture, were these: intentional efforts to include more diverse voices at all levels of governance; creation of leadership development programs to bring new people into governance; attention to critics, no matter how uncomfortable their message (this is easier sworn than performed, IMHO); active enlistment of students and early-career members to bring fresh perspectives; an open letter of apology to the communities that have been harmed by the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab undertone of the whole “interrogation” program; increased attention to the role of race in how the association operates; and more.

It’ll take time before we know the full impact of this whole process. What will this mean for psychology’s relationship with the public? Will people even know about this scandal? Will they care? Will they trust us less? And what will this do to the relationship between APA and its members? Will lots of people leave the organization in disgust? Will potential new members (e.g., current students in training) shy away?

We’ll see. Time will tell whether people feel they can trust psychologists again. Whether I can trust APA again. Right now, I am not proud to call myself a psychologist. I imagine people saying of anything associated with the field, “Psychology! Why would you trust psychology to help? They help with torture, that’s what they help with.” Why wouldn’t people think that? Why shouldn’t they?

As someone at the Town Hall said, psychology is better than its worst moments. This has, for sure, been one of my profession’s worst moments. I’m eager to see whether we can find our way again.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

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A place on the table

(If you received this blog by email, you might want to visit the actual site. The pictures work much better there. 

Just click on the title, “A place on the table”)

This summer, I’ve been on a serious return-to-fitness kick, trying to regroup from the long spell of inactivity brought on by last fall’s assorted orthopedic woes. I’ve been really conscientious about it, too, prioritizing walks and workouts and such rather than letting them take the last, left-over spots (if any) in my schedule. So today, after a nice lunch with a friend in Golden and before I got back to work, I planned to stop on my way home for a walk, thinking I’d probably do a loop on a local trail and call it good. But just north of Golden, I spotted the trail head for the North Mesa Trail. I’d never hiked it before (though I'd heard tales), and the steep initial climb really beckoned. So I traded lunch duds for walking shorts, slathered on sunscreen, and started climbing.

If you live in the Denver area and haven’t yet explored this trail (or rather, this web of trails), check it out. It does start with a serious uphill grade, but the almost immediate reward is great views to the west—that wonderful Colorado sky and the shadows of the clouds on the hills. But maybe the best treat for me was the pleasure of walking up a steep hill, settling into a steady-state pace, and discovering that my “training” has actually worked. If legs and lungs can smile, then mine were smiling. But I suspect my fitness regime is of far less interest than the scenery, so I’ll skip right to the nature tales and pictures.

From the road, North Table Mesa looks dry, rocky, and boring. But in truth, once you get up the hill and on top of the mesa, it’s really lovely. At least this year, with our ample rain, the meadows are soft and beautiful, and even mid-summer, the wildflowers and grasses are really nice. 

        

From the flat mesa top, you can see east to Denver and west to the afternoon clouds rolling in.

Around a bend in the trail, I was surprised to see a large-ish pond (in Colorado, we might call this a lake)—thanks, I suspect, to the abundant rain, since there are definitely no streams up there. 

I heard and saw lots of birds—meadowlarks, swallows, circling hawks, an American kestrel on a wire, a cormorant landing on the pond, and a bumblebee big enough to count as a small bird. 

And at the top of the highest promontory, the increasingly common rusty-legged signal carrier.

This unexpected adventure was such a treat—a trail I hadn’t walked, a beautiful day, and the sweet awareness that walking uphill is actually fun again. What a great day.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Witnessing Pluto

I was barely awake this morning when I thought about Pluto. I’ve been following the approach of the New Horizons spacecraft as it nears the “Pluto system” (Pluto and its five known moons), about 3 billion miles and more than 9 years after its launch. The thoroughly amateur astronomer in me was eager to learn the status of the mission, and I knew that the moment of its closest approach would be early this morning. That would be at 7:49 EDT, I recalled … translating that to 9:49 MDT. A bit later, a news alert on my partner’s phone declared that New Horizons had reached Pluto—at 5:49 MST, of course.

I had this instantaneous moment of deep disappointment: “Rats,” I thought (maybe out loud). “I wanted to notice that moment. I wanted to witness it.”

Pretty quickly, I realized that I was awake at the crucial moment. I had even noted the time at 5:45, and I was thinking about Pluto. That made me feel better, but I could still hardly wait to get to my computer to learn more—and I made a mental note not to miss the moment when, at about 8:53 EDT tonight (note to self: that would be 6:53 MST), New Horizons should send a brief signal indicating that it made it safely through the Pluto system. 

All day, as I monitored news about the encounter with one eye, I was also being curious about my early-morning reaction, my peculiar attachment to this event. It’s hardly central to my life, although it's obviously a matter of great interest. Why did it matter whether or not I was awake to witness that moment?

I wasn't wondering about the intensity of my interest in things astronomical. That’s a near-lifelong passion that has waxed and waned over the years but has never been absent. And I wasn’t wondering about my astonishment at the sheer magnitude and precision of the knowledge required to pull off such a feat—with now-old technology, with a target that had never even been seen clearly, a spaceship launched almost 10 years ago toward an impossibly remote and tiny moving object (smaller than our moon). (If you want to get a hint of the mind-blowing precision of this shot, described by one scientist as equivalent to hitting a hole in one with a golf shot that travels from New York to LA, check out this graphic). That’s definitely astonishing enough to warrant some serious interest, not hard to explain at all.

Besides, there are plenty of things to make this an especially noteworthy happening for me: the lead instigator and investigator for the project is at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, and bunches of CU students have worked on the project over the years. And then there’s Pluto’s mythical status—the planet (OK, dwarf planet) so small and far away that even Hubble can’t get a clear picture of it, the planet that was named by a child and that soon became the namesake of Mickey Mouse’s dog. How could I not feel some attachment to Pluto? (OK, so lots of people don’t … but it makes sense for me.)

But none of that is curious at all. No, the question that puzzled was this: Why was it so important to me that I be conscious of that precise moment when the spacecraft arrived at Pluto? That I “witness” it?

That question was in the back of my mind through the day as I hovered in the news and did my day's work. I kept returning to this answer: I think that, at least in part, it’s about age. In that moment, as in many these days, I was acutely aware that singular events won’t be happening indefinitely for me. And I don’t want to miss them as they come along. Pluto provided an occasion for me to look (again) at that part of my aging experience: missing things matters more to me. Even missing apparently unimportant things like the Pluto flyby.

In recent years, I’ve noticed a certain nostalgia, even regret, that has to do with experiences that passed without my paying (enough) attention. I actually wrote about this here a long time ago, and it keeps happening. For instance, I might recall a place I visited, a hike I took, a forest or a sunset I saw, a time with a friend, a physical challenge met—so many things that I know I experienced but that I don’t feel like I really noticed, actually witnessed. In retrospect, I find myself wishing that I had known it would be my last time being there, doing that, whatever it was, so I could have honored it more. Pluto’s very rare moment was reminiscent of those now rather frequent moments.

As I think about it, I believe I have a tendency to not notice experiences as they pass by—an unfortunate penchant under any circumstances, but especially lamentable as I grow old, when the opportunities to do it again, whatever it might be, are increasingly rare. It's good to have my attention drawn to this issue, even if it takes a (dwarf) planet to do it.

Coincidentally, this morning a friend, with whom I’ve talked about this general theme, sent me this cartoon that describes the feeling well.  

I know that New Horizons’ encounter with Pluto is not a life-changing event (for me) and that it may even seem trivial as an example to make this larger  point. But that’s part of the point—how seemingly “trivial” moments can carry a certain magic, if they matter (for whatever reason) and if we take the time to witness them. I think that’s where my momentary regret came from this morning: it mattered to me, and I feared I’d missed it. I don’t want to do that too often, because I don’t want too many regrets about missed singular experiences. Obviously, there will be many, far more important such moments. I’m grateful to Pluto for this reminder to notice them, however trivial or singular.

As for the New Horizons flyby, I had my phone set to signal me at 6:53 MDT this evening so I could check on the spacecraft's well-being. Just after 7:00, I saw a news flash that New Horizons had “called home,” right on schedule.

I’ll keep following it in the days to come. If you’re in the Boulder area and would like to join in that process, Fiske Planetarium on the CU campus will be hosting a couple of public events later this week where you can learn more—and also see some of the pictures being sent back across billions of miles.

I’ll be there, on time, MDT.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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