nebulous anxiety

I am worried that reading about someone with chronic sore-throats and flu has made me feel the same way. Quite possibly swimming in the bay for 20 min when I already had a scratchy throat was not a good idea. But I organized the swim, and two people drove up from the South Bay, so I didn't feel as though I had a choice. And it was glorious, at least swimming out toward the Golden Gate and feeling it get closer was, but then the beach seemed so far away and persisted in remaining so for far too long on the way back in. The water was decidedly crisp, and even with a wetsuit I felt significantly dizzy when I pulled myself out. Hell, I didn't even want to teach my yoga class this morning. I tried to call in sick, but there was no reply.

Now all I want to do is curl up in bed with a book, and it's only 8.30pm. Instead of writing, I've been planning my trip to the East Coast to look at colleges with my son. Somehow I feel that at 16 he should be planning this himself, but since it hasn't happened and we're flying next weekend I just had to step in. At his age, I was planning trips to Israel and all across Europe, without even the benefit of the internet. My ability to cope with travel must have peaked early, it seems to be such hard work now, and I feel anxious about getting maps, getting lost, missing appointments, or spending too much on car rentals and hotels. I should just relax, and consider it a pleasure trip.

I must remember to bring my camera, so that I am not always grabbing other people's pictures from online. Ah well, I can't find one. A picture in words: the dark gray bridge peeping under the dark gray clouds, more real and closeup once you are in the dark gray waves. Dark gray birds bob up and down on the water, in front of dark gray sails. The buildings of San Francisco in many shades of gray rain-stained and unmoving in the distance. I imagine myself splashing dolphin-like through the water in my dark gray wetsuit.

Brights, knee injuries

So I am back to resting my knee, having torn my ACL ligament yesterday while skiing. I feel angry with myself for not being more careful, but it was a run I had skied earlier in the day without any difficulty. The view from the top was amazing, I'll post a picture once I locate my camera card reader. Clear blue skies with blue ice-capped mountains in the distance, the nearby snow crisp and white like the sheets in a laundry detergent ad. I wanted to cry when I realized I had missed the sunset. My friend skied down behind the stretcher and put his sweater around me when I was shivering in the cable car, it would have been very cold and lonely without him.

On Christmas Day, while browsing the internet, I came across the Brights. They are the proselytes of a new religion, that has Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet for prophets. The aims of this new religion are to organize around disbelief in any mystical or supernatural elements, and advocate instead a 'naturalistic worldview', to gain public recognition for people who hold this worldview, and 'educate society' toward accepting such people. At first I felt worried about this new religion, that preaches intolerance toward other religions and attempts to convert people to its philosophy. But on second thoughts it is perhaps no worse than many traditional religions. I feel sad that while paying lip service to humanitarian values their website contains no volunteer opportunites or suggestions for doing good in society, either toward other brights or anybody else. All you can do as a Bright is help the Brights by promoting their faith. I worry a little that in a few years time it may become as unacceptable in scientific circles to be non-Bright as it is now in the Bay Area to be a Republican. The following statement, quoted from their website, is one I find particularly disturbing: "The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview." It is disturbing because I believe that ethics and actions should come from consideration toward others, both innate and socially sanctioned, and feelings of love, kindness and duty. It is not clear to me how a 'naturalistic worldview' accommodates such concerns, or in fact tells you anything about how to act morally.

My own atheism is pure apostasy. I have no interest in replacing God with a 'naturalistic worldview'. Doubt, curiosity, experiential and rational inquiry seem far more important to me than finding something to believe in.

On the one hand, I am fearful of promoting their cause by the mere fact of writing about them. On the other hand, I am playing with the idea of joining them to see whether there is any openness to change from within by promoting a more humanistic agenda. Thoughts, anyone?

Intersecting circles

At the end of her book, Encounters with the Invisible, Dorothy Wall writes about planning a trip to the mountains, the first in ten years after she collapsed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She and her husband spread maps of the Sierras on the bed, planning their route. I finish reading this book after returning from my trip to the mountains, and think about illness as an internal journey, one that is unplanned and unmapped, into uncharted territory, without even giving one's consent to go along for the ride.

Just last night, I was saying to my friend how healing it was to go out to the mountains, healing for the spirit to experience all the varied scenery, the change in air, and the sense of aloneness while at the same time being in the company of others. As we were walking, I thought about the people who had laid the trail, carving stairs in the rock, the people who must come out every spring to mark the trail with rows or piles of rocks on the white granite shelf, and all the footprints from this summer's hikers that must wash away if not with the first rain and snow then with the meltwater. My friend said that in the past, before cars, most people never traveled more than 30 miles from their birthplace. I don't know if that was ever true. But I do think that places used to be more varied than they are now. Even in my own childhood, in the 70's and 80's in Britain and Israel, I remember each town having a different local character whereas now they are populated by the same chain stores, the same shopping malls and people. The villages in the mountains here in California retain their own character, for better or worse. We were lucky to find someone awake at midnight to give us a room to stay!

When I got back to the office today, somebody asked if I had makeup on, she thought I looked nice. I explained it was just being outdoors all weekend that put some color in my cheeks.

Dorothy Wall talks about a picture taken before her illness that she used to look to for reassurance of who she was. Then, in a later chapter, she realizes how one can never return. I think this is best captured in TS Eliot's Four Quartets: "Fare forward travellers! Not escaping from the past/Into different lives, or into any future;/You are not the same people who left the station..." We assume a continuity of self which is shattered by an illness that flies in the face of our ordinary can do mentality. Wall remembers her grandmother and her father reading to her from The Little Engine that Could the lines "I think I can, I think I can... I thought I could, I thought I could." Interestingly, the author of the eponymous engine was a house pseudonym of the publishing company, and the story one that had been retold many times. My grandmother used to read me that story, as I was reminded when I heard my mother reading it to my children. I believe that in life we are to some degree following tracks, but our engines are generally facing backwards and we spend most of our lives running away, even if we think we have eyes in the backs of our heads to see the next mountain and chug up it. My mother used to believe in geographical solutions to her problems, generally problems of the body that she attributed to the physical environment, both internal and external. She never realized that they were her fellow travelers and simply changed.

We generally choose the path of our physical bodies through space, and this helps us feel alive, like the Little Engine. We can spread out maps and navigate through the world. The effects this will have on our inner experience are less predictable. I think of all the times I might have bumped into Dorothy Wall in the streets of Berkeley, like leaves floating on a stream bumping into each other, maybe never to meet again, maybe to cross further downstream.

I think of my relationship with my friend, who thinks too much. Now he's got me thinking as well! As we walked through the burnt forest at the end of our hike, I was thinking for some reason that I would give him a facing edition of Dante's Divine Comedy for his next birthday, when he turns 35. Apparently, that was Dante's age when he wrote that or started writing it, contrary to the common myth that people in those days only lived to 30. "Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita..." I wonder if there is a particular circle of hell for overthinking, where all the Little Engines that Could chug up and down a mountain, never realizing that they are traveling backwards and going round and round in circles, never noticing that it's always the same mountain, and that they are not all alone in the woods.