Barnett Weekly

We are all anxious about something from time to time, and spend moments worried about relationships, illness, money, jobs, and so on. If unfortunate enough to be anxious most of the time, our outlook on life, our health and how we treat others worsen; we suffer most of all.

To paraphrase the words of the 7th Century Zen Patriarch, Seng-Tsan, “The highest realization is to be without anxiety about imperfection.” Seng-Tsan was not speaking about perfection per se, but about our nagging dissatisfaction and anxiety about the events of ordinary life. He was talking about our inability to accept things as they are and to actually relax.

Relaxation today is thought of as plopping oneself down on the couch and watching TV, going to a movie, playing a video game or reading a magazine. But this is not relaxation; it is distraction from our anxiety, dissatisfaction, boredom or fatigue. For many of us, no sooner do we turn on the TV or begin reading then we fall asleep. We awaken no more relaxed than when we first plopped down.

I would like things to be the way I’d like them to be. When this happens I feel happy. Much of the time, however, things are either not quite the way I would like, or feel terribly wrong. This, of course, is the product of self-centered thoughts. When I fixate on an event or thought, particularly one about what’s wrong with me or others or life in general, a cascade of negative emotions that feed new thoughts with energy begin and in no time I feel anxious. Feeling anxious, I get aggressive or withdrawn, indulge in harmful and self-destructive activities, or move towards distraction. In this same way, many of us navigate from moment to moment, never really finding the emotional or psychic space to feel at peace. That space is always available, but we can’t see it though the fog and turmoil of our thoughts and feelings.

The key is that we can’t truly relax until we begin to be kind to ourselves. Kindness to ourselves does not mean repeatedly forgiving ourselves for our own foolish behavior or excusing the habitually hurtful ways we think and act, it means being reflective and honest about our anxiety-producing habits of mind, contemplating their effects and actively employing some discipline to alter them. Innately, we all know when we are hurting ourselves, but discarding harmful habits and changing the way we think and act is difficult. Intention is the first step, of course, then gently engaging in practices that support abandoning negative actions and thoughts helps to open the door to true self-kindness.

If we can be kind and gentle to ourselves we can then be kind and gentle with others and the world. I’ve come to understand that others are constantly struggling with anxiety, too.  Seeing this, I’ve realized that spending time in blame and wanting others to be different just adds to everyone’s problems, including my own.

Fundamentally, people have not changed since the 7th Century or before. Letting go of trying to change others and working on ourselves is still the first step. When and if we can fully abandon fixation and anxiety about the faults of others and the ordinary events of the world, the highest realization of complete, perfect relaxation can be ours.

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The health care debate has been an unseemly exercise in political positioning, special interest lobbying, horse-trading and near bribery. Health care is the fastest growing sector of the American economy, so discussions naturally stimulate anxiety, anger and confusion.

I suggest that in order to cut though the current crush of opinion, let’s examine health care from the very beginning: birth. (Well, that’s not exactly true – before birth is gestation – but later for that). We are all born and come into the world defenseless and in need of protection, a simple fact every mother understands. Who among us would fail to protect a helpless infant? This consideration is where an honest health care discussion starts. Protecting children is instinctual; can we agree that every child deserves health care, even if their family cannot afford it?

Does this instinct to protect others fade and if so, why? Are such feelings based on perceived levels of helplessness or matters of age? Do the elderly, handicapped and disabled deserve care? How do we determine lesser qualifications? Human beings are vulnerable to a wide variety of physical and emotional ills, and this is what health care is meant to address. The point is that when people suffer our natural, compassionate response as human beings is to try to alleviate it. Setting aside economics, providing universal health care is the naturally compassionate choice.

In the end death comes to us all, and comforting the dying is something we want for others, friends, loved ones and also ourselves. Here again, such care is a natural part of what makes us fully human. Thus, viewed from the perspective of basic compassion, it’s clear that all people deserve health care under all conditions and all stages of life.

But let’s examine health care from a different perspective: simple common sense. Bacteria and viruses are equal opportunity infectors; they do not discriminate between people based upon race, creed, color or income. Common sense dictates that promoting health and the eradication of preventable disease among all populations of people benefits everyone. If you are ill and receive no care, your illness will spread to others, and eventually to me. To ignore illness and disease is illogical from either individual or economic standpoints. Economically, the loss of productivity due to uncontained or untreated illness compared to the cost of providing free universal health is far greater. Investing in health simply insures a more healthy economy.

So who would suffer under free universal health care? Certainly not the public or the health care professionals, nor the hospitals, nurses or home-care providers; currently, one-in-seven U.S. jobs are in health care, and as the American population ages more jobs will be created. Let us be clear; the ones who will suffer will be the health insurance companies and their shareholders. But, I ask, what business is without risk? Throughout the evolution of our economy, various business sectors have undergone change. Steam engines were replaced by diesel engines, carriages by autos, propeller aircraft by jet planes, gas guzzlers by hybrids; this is simply the evolving nature of economics. Private health insurance companies are next.

Thus it is that during the 21st century, the wasteful and non-sustainable American model of profit-driven health care should and will naturally come to its well-deserved end.

Reprinted from The Sonoma Valley Sun Newspaper

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My father recently turned ninety. He’s had a rough couple of years, progressively losing much of his hearing and his eyesight. Neither entirely deaf nor blind, his deficiencies are nonetheless significant enough that he can no longer read and must wear hearing aids in both ears. His gait has slowed as arthritis takes its toll on his knees and a calcified aortic valve leaves him short of breath. His daily dose of medication has now reached eleven pills.

My father is a tough Brooklyn Boy, a natural scrapper who has faced, met and overcome major challenges in his life. He now faces his toughest challenge of all, watching who he has been disappear and fade away. The attributes that served him well are all but gone: wit and repartee, seductive boyish charm, a youthful manner and great stamina. His opponent is relentless, stealthy and determined; despite his wishes otherwise my father must eventually succumb, as will we all. He knows this, but in some strange fashion still feels that perhaps there is a chance he will just live on and on forever. Yet with each new movement towards decline, he is buffeted by his hope and fear, an exhausting emotional oscillation that leaves my father and everyone around him discouraged and depressed.

While he was recovering from a crisis last year I asked him how he’d imagined the last years of life; he answered that he had never thought about it. I’ll admit I was surprised, but then again I’ve watched him grow very old, something he never saw happen to his own father who died in his mid-sixties of a heart attack when my dad was but forty-five. Sitting with him recently, reading to him from his beloved New York Times, I found myself wondering how much like him I will be if I reach ninety. I can’t be sure, of course, but I think I won’t be as shocked by what it’s like as he seems to be.

I took the online AARP lifespan test the other day, a simple check-off survey about habits, current health, and mental attitude that predicts how long one will live. Despite type-2 diabetes (well controlled with diet and exercise) and heart disease (you gotta love Lipitor) the prediction was that I will live to ninety-four. Perhaps this estimate is based upon optimistic assumptions about health care in the future, and given that the fastest growing population segment in America is eighty-five and above, this prediction may well be true. But of course, that means that the decline my father has experienced in very old age will be mine to enjoy, also.

I’ve decided to implement an aging plan. I’m still young and healthy enough to develop talents I can use should I lose my sight in twenty or thirty years, for example. Learning to play the piano sounds good, as does memorizing books and poems to keep my brain sharp and working.

In this culture, alas, it’s not just aging from which we are likely to suffer, but increasing isolation and care at the hands of strangers instead of the warm embrace and familiar comfort of close friends. Being a member of a communal, closely-knit multi-aged community of shared interests, I’ve concluded, is thus the most important piece of the plan.

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Something really big is about to happen when pigs sprout wings and fly – at least that’s what we’ve been told. The sudden world-wide pandemic of swine flu, in which a mix of pig and bird flu virus has spread to people and hitched a ride on the world’s fleet of AirBus jets and Boeing 757’s comes as close to flying pigs as we are likely to see.

The flu pandemic of 1918 killed 40 million people, 2% of the world’s population of the time. For many its arrival confirmed the hypothesis of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), the British scholar who advanced the highly pessimistic theory that the size of the world’s population would be kept under control by the effects of disease, pestilence, famine and war. This idea maintained its currency until the latter part of the 20th century, when a combination of factors rendered Malthus’ ideas obsolete: antibiotics and the green revolution.

The green revolution, a combination of selective plant breeding and the widespread availability of man-made nitrogen fertilizers, supported the growth of earth’s human population from a level of 2 billion in the year 1900 to 6 billion in the year 2000. It is estimated that 2 billion of this increase was a direct result of increased food availability. Artificial fixed-nitrogen fertilizer (created by the Bosch-Haber process) was developed in Germany in support of its WWI munitions effort, but eventually, as documented in The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager, it transformed agriculture. Today, it is obesity not starvation that is increasing in the world. Ironically, world hunger is a by-product of poor transportation, corruption, greed and inadequate storage facilities, not food production.

An industrial agricultural model dominates world food production, both plant and animal. Manufactured pesticides, antibiotics and artificial fertilizers, as noted by author Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, fuel this industrial model and create monocultures of both modified plant species and densely packed stockades and warehouses of livestock raised for human consumption. Such monoculture is a perfect “Petri-dish” environment, and creates favorable conditions for new plant and animal disease vectors wherein quickly-spreading drug-resistant viruses and bacteria mutate rapidly. If and when these disease organisms cross the species border to human beings, the risk of pandemic arises. This has been true of the Bird Flu in Asia and the dramatic rise of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis.

Assuming the media hype is warranted, no vaccine is developed and the Swine Flu kills 2% of the human population, 120 million people will perish over the course of 12-24 months. This is a staggeringly high number and in human terms, unprecedented. As our own populations have become larger and more densely packed, human society has also become a monoculture of sorts, the perfect vector for new illnesses – physical, emotional and cultural.

In One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, the inmates of a mental institution are revealed as decent, sane and virtuous, while those running the institution (like nurse Cratchett) reveal their cruelty, insanity and lack of virtue. In some strange way, this topsy-turvy Cuckoo’s Nest arrangement is playing itself out in the way we humans have chosen to run the entire world, sacrificing health and decency for short-term profit and power. Swine Flu, I’m afraid, is just another symptom of how cuckoo we really have become.

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In mapping brain function, specific areas of the brain have been found to be primarily responsible for particular functions, such as hearing, seeing, feeling, motor coordination, reasoning and so on. Despite this clustering of functional areas, the brain is nonetheless capable of fully integrating input between varying brain locations and producing an uninterrupted and generally functional sense of self and reality. Neuroscientists estimate that the billions of neurons in the human brain establish hundreds of trillions of connections with each other.

The periods of life during which many of these connections are created are in infancy and toddlerhood. I’ve watched this happening as our granddaughter Isabelle, now nine months old, has become intensely curious about everything within reach. She does not understand the world well, but she clearly senses that something is happening, and she wants to know about it. Her brain is furiously constructing what neuroscientists call brain/body maps, mental configurations of one’s body and the world around us.

Brain/body maps allow us to move and function properly in the world. Within our minds the postural arrangement and functioning of the body’s movements are replicated in a network of neural connections activated when we move and also when we are just anticipating movement. Just as various areas of the brain become activated when we dream, and readings taken of the brain reveal optical or hearing centers activated when we dream of sights and sounds, so when we are awake and anticipate or imagine movement, areas of the brain/body map are activated.

For example, in thinking about playing tennis – visualizing the swing of the racket and hitting the ball over the net – the centers of the brain responsible for those movements are activated in precisely the same way as when those movements are physically performed. Moreover, studies of brain/body maps shows that individuals can markedly improve their physical performance simply by visualizing a specific physical activity for regular periods over time. Remarkably, the degree of improvement closely matches that of those who engage in physical practice. This is as true in playing the piano as it is in tennis, golf or hitting a baseball. These findings have changed the nature of sports and musical training, as well as methods of rehabilitation for head trauma, physical injuries or stroke.

The implications of mental training for the development of new brain/body map connections are intriguing when considering other human behaviors. People engage in many activities that have a physical component, but also include emotional and sensate qualities. Material generosity, for example, involves attitude, emotional feelings, and the actual physical act of giving. If the mental activation of brain/body maps can improve playing the piano, can a similar activation improve generosity? Does the imaginary exercise of generosity – visualizing the transfer of an object of value to another person and forming feelings of openness and kindness towards others – actually lead to an improved capacity for giving?

The brain/body map is created over time, and our ability to adapt to changing conditions is a reflection of our ability to alter the brain/body maps within us. Studies prove that this ability lasts a lifetime, which means it is never too late to learn new things or change our ways of being. Practice it seems – be it physical or mental – does indeed make perfect.

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