Psych-Out

Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains.  With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise.  Buddhists call it our monkey-mind.

In any given hour we’re besieged by hundreds of thoughts.  Most of these thoughts are the same thoughts we had the hour before.  And, the hour before that.  The same thoughts over and over — for hours, days, weeks, and even years.  Sometimes they just come on their own.  Sometimes, we coax the more compelling of the bunch so we can poke and prod them over and over.

The more we think something, the more likely we’ll think it again.  That’s a neurological fact.  To the brain, thought is an action.  To think a thought, then to think it over and over, we strengthen that circuitry.  Fire it up, baby! Soon, it’ll glow at the slightest provocation.  And if fear attaches and catches hold, instinctively we’ll fix to it.  Feed it.  Nourish it.  Hold onto it and watch it grow.

Fear is one of those feelings that’s in love with itself.  It will take the slightest sign of trouble to justify and amplify it’s own existence.  And, if that sign isn’t there?  It will make it up.  It scans the world, our imagination, our memories for it’s reason to be, because…well…that’s what it’s supposed to do.  It’s a feature, not a bug.  Why?  When it comes to survival, it’s better to be wary, wrong, and live, than to take your time to be accurate and end up as somebody else’s meal.

Genetically speaking, physical survival is king. Yet, our psychological lives are tied to this very same survival system.  These days, most of us can go a lifetime without ever having to run for our lives.  Instead, we have deadlines.  Mortgages.  Car breakdowns.  Hundreds of unanswered e-mails marked “urgent”.  Our  freedom from physical danger allows us the privilege to exercise our threat response on bosses, co-workers, lovers, kids, husbands, and wives.

We’re free now to imagine all kinds of threatening possibilities to stir up that monkey cage.  Even better, let’s put that threat sometime in the future when there’s nothing we can do about it.  Watch our monkey-mind agitate.  Imagine that fear coming to get you sometime next week — the body will react as if it’s right in front of your face!

And if we forget that we were afraid?  Oh right!  Let me get back to that! We’ll conjure it back.  We’ll encourage our own obsessiveness over our envies, our grievances, our jealousies, our losses.  We’ll do it in future time where they haven’t yet happened.  It will happen.  It will…it will…it will.   Now, we can sit bracing ourselves while tied to our helplessness.  We’ll sit.  Wait.  Stew within the electro-chemical buzz.  We’ll find meaning in all that brain noise.

Shhh…listen…there are messages in that static.

How we love to rattle our own cage only so we can watch our monkey-thoughts scream, hop about, and agitate.

Nature loves deception.  She weaves camouflage.  Encourages disguise.  Elaborate games of hide and seek are played out in rain forests, deserts, and suburban backyards for her creatures to secure mates, food, status, and safety. Everything from orchids, to moths, to we humans.

All of us deceive — big deceptions, little deceptions. Who hasn’t exaggerated a resume, or hidden feelings from a friend, boss, or spouse.  Then there’s the excuse as to why you didn’t get that report in on time.  Try to live a full day of nothing but the truth.  You’d be impossible to your loved ones.  Impossible to yourself.

Biologist Robert Trivers wrote, “One of the most important things to realize about systems of animal communication is that they are not systems for the dissemination of the truth.”  Animal signals convey correct information, misinformation, or both.

Nature has given we humans an even more clever deceptive capacity – self-deception.  We not only hide our truths from others, we are masters at hiding it from ourselves.  Biologists consider self-deception an elaboration and improvement in our deceptive abilities.  It provides a much needed check on our self-awareness.

As important as self-awareness is to both our well-being, and getting along with our loved ones, it also has its shadow. Awareness of every single motive, of all the biological/physiological mechanisms and sensory signals bombarding us would paralyze our capacity to act decisively.  We’d never do the things we need to survive, to mate, to improve our lot in life.

It’s dog eat dog out there.  With every attempt to get ahead, there’s a potential rival out there with the intent to get there first, or at least thwart your attempts.  Want that job?  That mate?  Money back on your tax return?

Trivers writes, “Self-deception renders the deception being practiced unconscious to the practitioner, thereby hiding from other individuals the subtle signs of self-knowledge that may give away the deception being practiced.”

We play hide and seek with our own motives.  Like expert investigators, we’ll build a case to support some action — a case that is so convincing that we  can keep even ourselves in the dark about what we’re doing, and why!

We spin stories to deceive others and ourselves, so we can bypass conscience and self-awareness;  so, we can get what we want comfortably. When was the last story you told where you were the villain, and someone else the hero?  How many times in our stories of some misdeed are we the wronged party?

With many of our motives remaining unconsciousness, we are thus better able to hide deception’s signals.  In essence, we increase the probabilities of meeting some need without the telltale signals that accompany our sometimes burdensome awareness. We even create entire belief systems with hidden self-serving biases.

As Triver’s writes, “The more skillfully these self-serving components are hidden from both the self and others, the more difficult it will be to counter them.”

Some common forms of self-deception:

Beneffectance: We all tell our stories as being beneficial and effective. We exaggerate our own role in a beneficial outcome, and minimize our responsibility when things go wrong.

Exaggeration: repeated tales of humanitarian accomplishments grow in the retelling.  Memory can always be counted on to supply the new facts.

Illusion of consistency:  We rewrite past experiences to make them seem consistent with present realities.  Consistency gives the illusion that we make very few mistakes. We even add details to memories to alter new information that may be potentially derogatory.

Perception of relationships: We are altruistic.  It’s someone else who is selfish.

Perceptual defense and perceptual vigilance: We see what we wish to see. We eagerly embrace any information that is self-satisfying.  And, if it’s not? We have built in biases that will make it seem that way.

The best we can do?   Own that we are one of nature’s creatures.  Be honest, about our wonderfully irritating capacity, to tell stories that deceive ourselves as well as deceiving others..
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Trivers, R. (1985). Social Evolution. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings.

Ali accepts Foreman’s blows

“The crutch of Time can do more than the steely club of Hercules.”  Baltasar Gracián

Nothing can be more disarming than restraint in the face of powerful forces you can’t control.  To simply lay against the ropes.  Hold back.  Let the forces around you work themselves out.  Sometimes it means accepting the blows, while protecting yourself in the best way possible until the time is right for you to act.  The right time to make your move.

No one thinks of the courage, strength, and fortitude that restraint requires of us.  Our instincts compel us to act quickly in face of perceived threat or danger.  Push out, quickly.  Fight or flee.  Our evolutionary heritage has wired us with the decision rule, “it’s better to be wrong and act quickly, than to weigh it all out to be accurate.”  In the wilds, the time you take for accuracy, could be the last time you see.  When running from lions, it’s a great strategy.

But what if you’re in the ring and there’s no running, no readily available escape.  And what if to fight, at least at that moment, puts you in even greater jeopardy.  It takes over-riding millions of years of evolutionary programming to lay back, protect yourself, and wait.

On the night of Octoer 20, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire, one of the greatest and most cunning fighters ever, Muhammad Ali, came to such a moment.  After the first round, Ali came to the sudden realization that he couldn’t master his opponent, the powerful George Forman, by taking him head on.  He couldn’t out punch him.  Forman was far stronger.  He couldn’t out dance him.  Foreman was far younger, and would endlessly stalk him.  He couldn’t intimidate him.  Foreman was confident and fearless.

Foreman had dominated every opponent who had entered the ring with him.  He’d readily knocked out Joe Fraziar and Ken Norton.  Two boxers who had handed Ali his only losses.

Foreman crushes Joe Frazier

What strategy did Ali come to?  He laid against the ropes and waited.  The famous Rope-a-Dope.  It’s unimaginable to think of the blows Ali suffered for three rounds.  Foreman owned arguably one of the most powerful punches of any boxer in history.  The continuous volley of blows to Ali’s gut and head were punishing, even as Ali did the best he could to protect himself.

But Ali waited.  He waited knowing that eventually Foreman’s force would punch itself out.  All he had to do was survive until that time.

Of course, most of us aren’t boxers in a ring.  But in our day to day there are times when we find ourselves against the ropes with no place to go, and lashing out would make matters even worse.  There are forces around us we can’t seem to control.  Sometimes, the best strategy?   Hold back.  Restraint.

By the 8th round Foreman had punched himself out.  In one of the most amazing moments in boxing history, George Foreman was knocked out.  As the old saying goes, “Time and I can take on any two.”

from When We Were Kings,  Ali masters the beast in Zaire (Watch it!)

“More humans have run away from their enemies than have fought them.”
Theodore Zeldon, An Intimate History of Humanity

We are escape artists.  We are a species more prone to flight, than facing our battles with our backs up, teeth bared and claws ready to dig in.  (Our teeth and claws are pretty useless in a fight, anyway, except against each other.)  For most of us, to stand in there and fight means over-riding a highly evolved impulse that commands our bodies, “Run!  Get out of there!”

Escape brings us to safety.  Escape brings us respite.  If successful, we come to a place of real or imagined sanctuary, whether physical or emotional.  Escape allows us safe haven where we can gather our wits, our strength, and our allies.  And if we need, it allows us to lick our wounds.   Emily Dickinson wrote, “Escape – it is the Basket/In which the heart is caught.”

The notion of escape gets a bum wrap in cool-headed times.  Only cowards fail to turn and face the test, we’re often told.   But, how much we enjoy those Hollywood chase scenes (nearly all movies have one), and how many times do we whisper to the hero or heroine when the villain is nearby and has the upper hand, “Get out of there – please.”

Matrix Bike Chase

In the Alain Resnais film Mon Oncle d’Amerique, the real-to-life neurosurgeon, philosopher, and behavioral researcher Henri Laborit proclaimed that science confirms the opinion of the ancient sages – to run away is the truest wisdom.  Fighting, if successful, becomes addictive and draws us into the stress of a competitive life.  And the chronic stress of a competitive, combative life will eat at us from the inside out.

You see, it’s not escape that’s the problem, but an inhibited fight-or-flight response.   Inhibition can affect health and our immune systems.  Once we start a cycle of inhibited action that habit engraves itself into our body-memory.  Instead of fighting or fleeing, we will habitually freeze in face of those pesky modern day threats, and thus render ourselves helpless.

Cat and mouse between blind Audrey Hepburn and Alain Arkin, Wait Until Dark

As Laborit urges, escape first and foremost from your inhibitions.  We need to fight;  or,  we need to flee.  If neither is possible, then find some other way of turning the unbearable situation into meaningful action. Talk.  Write.  Get angry.  Laugh it off.  Insult the person who’s annoying you.  Whatever it is, do it with a sense of purpose.

Watch an animal escape from a trap.  He’ll escape with power, assuredness, and intent.  How far will he run, once free?  Until he’s out of harm’s way — no more, no less — then, back to business.

Our escapes are many.  We escape into alcohol, religion, art, sports, vacations, movies, drugs, sex and rock-n-roll.  We no longer escape boars, bulls, and saber tooth tigers, but bosses, spouses, bill-collectors, kids, and head-concocted threats that live in either our memory or our imaginations.  When we meet the enemy now, often he is us, and as often there’s no place to run but to select corners of our own thoughts.

Remember, however, escape, too, can be habit forming.  When we run often we forget to stop, or run too far, or run to the wrong corner, or don’t look back so we know when we’re out of harm’s way, thus over-stressing our resources. Sometimes we overstate the danger before us and run when there’s nothing to run from.  And other times, we mistake a healthy dose of flight with avoidance, choosing to hide out indefinitely in our trees, caves, or burrows instead of stepping back out into the bump-and-grind of everyday life.

Escape from swift Cheetah!

Urban Confinement II, by Anja Percival

There’s an ache within us — a sense that something essentially human is slipping from our grasp.  We live surrounded by concrete, steel, plastic, and bright unnatural light.  Closed in spaces – whether office cubicles, bedrooms, elevators, our automobiles – are the rule rather than our cozy exception.  Daily, we navigate walkways, gates and fences, crosswalks, locked doors, marked and unmarked property lines.  “No trespassing” signs can bring a contemplative beach stroll to a halt.

We might feel it most in big cities.  No doubt that urban living brings excitement, innovation, and raises incomes and possibilities.   At the same time, the bigger the city, the more crowded our spaces and the more rapid our pace.  In fact, researchers have found that the more populated the city the faster its people walk.   And to move it all along with order and efficiency, time and space has to be structured.  Our lives have become governed by wristwatches, timed traffic lights, scheduling technologies, automatic door locks, and crosswalks.

We’ve learned to live, and even love, our walled-in ordered lives.  The natural world is a wild encroachment, a threat if not bound, ordered, and managed.  Ooooh, baby baby it’s a wild world. “Keep out!” the signs warn.  “Stay within the lines.”  And our ache whispers on.

Signs, by Five Man Electric Band

It shows itself in our chronic anxieties and depressions.  At times, it’s a dull sensation of not being at home in our own skins.  Our blessing and curse is that we’re highly adaptable creatures.  We can learn better than any other creature how to make the most horrid environments home.  In our modern age, we’ve learned to love the comfort and safety of staying inside.

If we’re lucky, once or twice a year we make our escape.  Like hounds dashing through a slit in the screen door, we rush toward our two weeks in the mountains, or by the ocean, or that lakefront cabin.  Hunters hunt.  Rock climbers climb.  Hikers hike.  Campers camp.  Sunners sun.  Then, we rush back to back into the confines of that familiar ache.

Researchers have found that our senses are wired to find certain landscapes appealing.  Our reward circuitry lights up at the sight of hillsides, meandering streams, paths bending around partially blocked views, verdant green foliage capped with color.  To the senses of our evolutionary ancestors these landscapes may have signaled abundance and safety.   Some have argued that our sense of natural beauty is the mechanism that drove our ancestors into suitable habitats.

Pastoral Landscape, Asher Brown Durand, 1861

We are meant to move, not sit around for hours on end watching our tiny little backlit TV and computer screens while eating potato chips. Our visual system loves dashes of color and wide opened spaces with a touch of surrounding mystery.  We are meant to engage our environment, not be confined by it.  We are happiest expressing ourselves.  Listening to the rustling of leaves and babbling of cool water streams.  Using our hands.  Running.  Jumping.  Meandering.  Swimming.  Climbing.  Touching.

To ease that ache need we see past those barriers of concrete and steel?  Need we every now and then throw out our well-ordered schedules for at least one day every week?   It seems we come back into ourselves, if only for a moment, whenever we step off the marked path and into nature’s disordered and wild ways.

“A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home.  It does not show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on.” Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway

We all have a beast within, a bull to kill…whether it be a habit, a troublesome attachment, a pattern of thought, a sorrow, an addiction, a mood, a fixation, a fear, or something that brings us to rage.

Know that bull.  Study where it’s taken its place of refuge.  That place in your life where it burrows in.  It could be in a bottle of scotch.  It could be a room in the house, a chair, your garage, or even in front of your TV or computer screen.

“…in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.“

It could be a state of mind, or that way in which you address your lover, kids, husband, or wife.  It could be a place in your imagination where you return again and again to relive a conversation, an encounter, or a past or future dread.  It could be a thought, or a cherished belief.

“The bull may take up his querencia in a place where a horse has been killed in a previous fight, where he smells the blood;  a place where he has tossed a bullfighter, or any part of the ring for no apparent reason at all;  simply because he feels at home there.”

In that place, your bull will be confident, brave, and secure.  When you, or anyone else, attempts to challenge it there, you may feel its stubborn refusal in your brooding, or snapping, or numbing, or anger, depression, anxiety, or irritation.  The bull has lifted its horns for the goring.  Pity the poor loved one who tries to step toward it there.

Like a great matador, we need bring the beast out from it’s place of safety.  After a long day’s work, refuse to let it establish its place in your ring.  Risk making it uncomfortable.

“The bull must be brought out;  but he is gone completely on the defensive and will not respond to the cape and will cut at them with his horns, refusing altogether to charge.”

Step away from that computer.  Change your tone of voice.  Refuse to spend the night brooding in that chair.  Reach for that novel you’ve wanted to read, instead of the TV remote.  Pull out that bike, camera or drawing pad, instead of cracking open that beer, marijuana, or bottle of Xanax.  Kiss your partner, instead of barking out that complaint.  (Or stamp your feet and yell, instead of that half-hearted kiss, if that’s where the bull chooses to live.)  Go to that movie by yourself, instead of waiting by the phone.  Cook that delicious meal, instead of another night of pizza or take-out chinese.

That pint of ice cream you seem ever destined to eat?  Look it square in the eyes, then show it your cape.  Weekends get you down?  Drink too much?  Take a canoe trip, instead of burrowing in and letting that bull raise its surly horns through your boredom, or list of domestic chores.

“…a bull who knows how to use his horns and who cannot be made to leave his querencia is as dangerous for the man to come within range of as a rattlesnake….”

Be brave.  Be clever.  Change it up.  Break routine.  Coax it out.  If just for an afternoon, flash your cape, and by surprise, slay the fear that owns you.   Olé!

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Death In Afternoon, Ernest Hermingway.  p150-151

’“An olive won’t ripen any quicker, however much you mess with it.” (Tuscan Proverb)

Olive grove

We are time–addicts. Time-sick. We’ve come to feel our lives as tiredly, time-deprived. Time is our heroin. We mojo our lives trying to find ways to score more and more. Let’s add time for me. Time for you. There’s work, there’s exercise. There’s family time. Special time for e-mail. Oh, and then there’s organizing those seven hundred thirty-six digital photographs. I’ll save that for next month. That novel I’ve always wanted to read? I’ll make time next year.

We gorge ourselves, yet never end up satisfied. Our solution? More activity at even a faster pace. Speed reading, speed meditating, speed yoga.  Let’s keep that rat-wheel turning. Speed up. Keep moving. That fix is coming. “I’ll move faster. Schedule my time better. I’ll find that plan so I can finally squeeze in every want, desire and need.”

We hire personal coaches, buy the latest scheduling technologies, we read dozens of books by time gurus. But, like a drug deal gone bad, the best laid plans go astray. We can’t open that vein to slip that last half-dozen activities in. Depression and anxiety ensues.

Queen, Under Pressure

In his book Slowness, Carl Honoré writes, “In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.”

We get a kick from going fast. Literally. Think roller coasters, and downhill skiing, and snowmobiles. Even rushing to and from work, or the yoga center, will give us that kick. There’s a heady surge of sensory input when we go fast. Adrenaline and noradrenaline shoot into our blood stream. Two chemicals released during sex; two chemicals tied to our most basic stress response. Fight or run.

When we start off our mornings in a mad-dash rush, we signal to our bodies DANGER DANGER. Even if we’re just driving to the library. We trigger our sympathetic nervous system into high gear. Then, it stays there for the rest of the day. Fight-or-flight with nothing really to fight, and nowhere to flee. Day in, day out. More hours in the day than not. It’s not the place in our bodies where we’re meant to make our home.

Our sympathetic nervous system is meant for special occasions, or periodic spurts during the course of the day. Say, when that lion is chasing us, or we haven’t eaten in days and we need that kill. Or, when times are good and we’re up for mating. Little surges of challenge here and there during our days are okay. Some stress is good for us. It invigorates our spirit, makes us more resilient. Like that sports car that occasionally you need to take onto the highway and rip open full-throttle.

Still, it’s the opposing parasympathetic nervous system where we find our true home. Eating figs by the watering hole, with nothing much to do but rest and digest, whether it’s food, or the day’s experiences.

It’s here in our parasympathetic nervous system where we consolidate memories, heal our bodies, digest our food, organize our thoughts, solve our problems, restore our sanity. We’re most creative when we slow down. Have a problem you’re trying to work through? You’re more likely to find that creative solution taking a bath, or brushing your teeth, or taking a stroll, or lollygagging in the back yard, than when racing into and through that next activity fix. Albert Einstein would sit in his Princeton University office for hours staring into space. He changed the world.

Our time addiction can be slowed. Take a day a week, or even just an evening or two, and ignore those Time tyrants. Forget those plans. Bring a spontaneous revolt to your soul. Throw off the self-help books, blackberries, e-mail, to-do lists, or that novel you were intending to read. To hell with yoga, meditation, the kid’s soccer game, the book club, and weeknight hockey. Tell your gurus and those pushers of personal growth to go jump in the lake.

Go outside and stare into the sky. Take off all your clothes. Or, turn off all the lights, build a fire, and watch the flames flicker and dance. Dare yourself for a day, a night, or even just an hour to live in the glow of knowing that time is forever and always at hand.

Simon and Garfunkel, Sound of Silence

Imagine. You are running. The sun warms your skin. You feel the drumming of the pavement against the bottoms of your feet. Your arms move in rhythm to your steps. Beads of sweat trickle down your forehead. Smell the freshly mowed grass. Birds flutter and chirp along the tree lined street. An occasional car passes. You hit stride. You are running with more energy than you’ve ever run before. A feeling of health and animal pleasure glow inside your body.

If you stayed with the above fantasy, the same regions of your visual, olfactory, and kinesthetic brain circuits lit up as would have if you really were taking that run. It’s the same if you imagined tapping out a pattern with your fingers, hitting a tennis ball, or imagining your cat hop onto your lap.

We’ve known for some time that experience changes the function and structure of our neural wiring. We call this learning. But what has become increasingly evident is that thinking alone, with no input from the outside world, can also change the physical structure of our brain.

Researchers asked one group of subjects to visualize practicing a 5-finger right-handed piano exercise over and over again for several hours. They were not to touch the keys, but only imagine themselves doing so. The same regions of the brain that controlled the right fingers expanded in the same way as those subjects who were instructed to actually practice the piece touching the piano.

The mere thought of doing something has the capacity to change your brain structure, and thus your performance. It’s something that sports psychologists have know for a long time. If you can see it, you’re training your brain and your body to make it happen.

Researcher Gary Klein found that imagination, or mental simulation, is one of the most important decision making tools for combat commanders, fireman, chess masters, ER doctors, ICU nurses. In the heat of the moment, experts don’t follow rules and procedures. Nor do they use formal logic. Instead, they create mental images based on their experiences. As one fire commander confided, “To be a good fire ground commander, you need to have a rich fantasy life.”

Klein writes, “he was referring to the ability to use the imagination, to imagine how the fire got started, how it was going to continue spreading, or what would happen using a new procedure. A commander who cannot imagine these things is in trouble.” (1)

Visualization is not just for athletes or experts under fire. It can be a crucial tool for navigating your day to day, especially if depressed, anxious, or finding yourself facing some uphill battle. If we practice the scene in our imagination and build into the fantasy as much positive emotion as we can muster, then we have brought ourselves several steps closer to accomplishing whatever challenge is before us. If you can see it, you are crucial step closer to making it happen.

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(1) Klein, Gary. Sources of Power. US: MIT Press, 1999. (p. 45.)

Samual Awaking Eli,  George de la Tour

2:48 am.  For no apparent reason, we’ve awakened.  “Four more hours,” we think, then toss to our other side.  If lucky, sleep overtakes us for the rest of the night.  If not, we lay there fretting about the loss of sleep, thus cheating ourselves – not of sleep, but of the wee hours.

Segmented sleep may be more natural to us than a continuous eight hours. In his book At Day’s Close, historian A. Roger Ekirch writes, “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.”

Anthropologist Carol Worthman studied the sleep patterns of non-Western populations where artificial light is minimal, if not absent all together.  From the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa to the Swat Pathan herders in Pakistan, Dr. Worthman documented a pattern of communal sleep in which individuals drifted in and out of sleep throughout the night.  Other anthropologists have found that in some African villages, Tiv, Chagga, and G/wi, for example, life after midnight is surprisingly lively with newly roused adults and children.

Could it be that there was an evolutionary advantage to segmented sleep?  Life in the open savannas was brimming with nocturnal predators.  Periods of nightly awakening may have been crucial to our survival.

The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau

Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted a landmark experiment in which he placed a group of normal volunteers in 14-hour dark periods each day for a month. As part of the experiment, he let the subjects sleep as much and as long as they wanted.

By the fourth week, subjects averaged 3-5 hours of solid sleep, followed by an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness.  Then, they returned to sleep for another 3-5 hour sleep period.  Such a pattern of interrupted sleep has been observed in other wild animals.

What did our pre-modern european relatives do during that time of our first awakening, or as some would call it, the watch?  First of all, few of us fretted.  We viewed that time as natural to our nocturnal stirrings.  We’d smoke tobacco.  Tend a fire.  Pray.  Study.   Talk with our bedmate.  Copulate.  Some of us would leave our beds;  some would not.  Benjamin Franklin would take “cold air baths” or sit naked in his chamber and read, or write.

Godfried Schlalcken (1643-1706)

It was a time for magic, for mischief, for light domestic work, or for reflection. This time “twixt sleepe and wake” is semi-conscious.  As Nathaniel Hawthorn insisted in The Haunted Mind, it was a time “where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly present.”  In 1692, the Hammersmith minister John Wade complained it was a time of “unsettled independent thoughts,”  “vain unprofitable musing,”  and “devising mischief.”

Dr. Wehr likens this intermittent period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness with a physiology all its own.  In the wee hours, silence is magnified, our thoughts concoct schemes and plans, we pull together far reaching connections, and our minds seem as if primed for self- reflection.

Maria Magdalena, George de la Tour

Next time you awaken in those wee hours – slip out of bed, wander the darkness of your house, sit in your favorite chair, perhaps light a candle, or brew a cup of tea.  Take out that notebook and draw, or write in your journal.  Soak in the sensibility of that forgotten segment of time lost to our age of time schedules, computer screens, i-phones, 24-hour cable news, and artificial light.  Tell yourself that it’s not a time of lost sleep, but merely the night’s first awakening.

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Read: Ekirch, A. Roger, At Day’s Close.  W.W. Norton & Co.  2005.

“Conversation has to explore new territory to become an adventure.”
Theodore Zeldin, Conversation

A great conversation casts a spell.  You know the kind of conversation.  Where time disappears.  There’s no place else you’d rather be.  Like a great meal, it fills us.  Like an aphrodisiac, it excites us. Through the interweaving of words, thoughts, and ideas, something within us changes.

The Bean Feast, Jan Steen

A great conversation is improvisational.  It strikes as if out of nowhere:  often late at night; or, within the soft flickering glow of candlelight; or, woven within the tastes, textures, and scents of that great meal.

I found myself in one of those conversations, in a dining car on a train from Ann Arbor to Albuquerque.  We were an unlikely quartet of strangers tossed together by the train’s 7:30 dinner seating schedule –  an elderly couple from Oregon who’d never before left their state; a tattooed, face-pierced death metal avenger with a Morbid Angel t-shirt; and, me.

Our table talk twisted and turned across the dusky cornfields of Iowa over two bottles of wine.  No expectations of a future, and no shared baggage from  the past, the four of us laughed heartily at life, at ourselves, while wondering aloud about each other.  There was an ever present curiosity about our divergent philosophies and life experiences peppered with musings about the likes of Ozzie Osborne, Sinatra, Led Zepplin, and Elvis.

Opening scene:  Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train

Great conversations are filled with the unexpected.

Theodore Zeldon in his book Conversation writes, “conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts:  they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought.  Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards; it creates new cards.”

There are plenty of books that teach the how-to’s of conversation.  Like trying to follow a manual on how to make love, however, you’ll fail without the right spirit and mood.   You can’t coax that great conversation without a sense of safety, mutual respect, acceptance, and curiosity.  And, according to Zeldon, what matters most is courage.  Courage to speak one’s mind.  Courage to be open to new ideas, and new ways of thinking.   Courage to acknowledge differences.  Courage to listen.

My Dinner with Andre, by Louis Malle

These truths hold for friends, co-workers, spouses, lovers, parents and their children. How many dinner times turn miserable because of iron-fisted commands about what is and isn’t acceptable to say, think, and feel?  How many relationships start to falter for fear of letting slip, or just hearing, those private, yet exciting little thoughts that slide against the grain of convention?

Conversation flourishes when the table is set as a safe place to make discoveries about the world, to discuss them, and digest them.  And, when there’s no cause for fear.

You want to open the possibility for more talk in your life? Loosen the reigns.  Keep at bay your fears of what you might say, or what you might hear.  Nurture the qualities of spirit and mind that make for great conversation –

well-informed, sympathetic, interested in life, moderate in response, curious about differences in life experiences;  be attentive, good humored, have a sense of proportion, don’t preach, don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t be argumentative; be original, broad-minded, charitable, unselfish, considerate, flexible, poised, enthusiastic, and, don’t forget, always a trifle whimsical.

Dangling Conversation, Simon and Garfunkel (Youtube by Starlightmoonflower)