Finding Our Power in How We See, Hear, and Speak: Hearing Both the Speech of Other People as Well as Trees as the Way the World Speaks in Us

I was recently walking down my rural road. It was a quiet afternoon, mostly sunny and in the 80s. About a half mile from home, on the edge of a forest, the road turned sharply. When I reached the turn, it was suddenly windy. The tree leaves were shaking. The energy was the same as what precedes a rainstorm. But there were no clouds. And as soon as I walked 5 or 10 feet past this group of trees, the leaves were quiet.

 

I realized I had noticed the wind that inhabits this space many times before. And this was, as I said, especially true minutes or maybe hours before a rainstorm, when the leaves and trees in this curve in the road vibrated. It served as a semaphore or audiphore, a warning system, to turn back before the rains came. Why did the wind speak like this? Did it have to do with a change in air pressure caused by the road turning and butting against the forest? Or something else? It felt like the spot had a life of its own and could speak on its own. But somehow, before now, I hadn’t grasped anything of what was being said.

 

Life can give us so much, but we miss a great deal of it. In a way, our senses exist both to notice and ignore, to sense as well as filter what we perceive. The research psychologist and professor Dr. Robert Ornstein talks about the senses as “data-reduction systems.” He points out if we took in everything, if we became conscious of everything going on around us at any point in time, we’d be overwhelmed. It would be too much stimulation.

 

Ornstein quotes the 19th century philosopher and physician, often called the “father of American psychology,” William James as saying the mind acts like a sculptor. Out of the raw and swarming chaos around us we, through cumulative choices and with the help of our ancestors, our culture, and linguistic systems, we select this and reject that. We create the world we live in and feel. We’re also taught or conditioned to accept this and deny that. What we consciously perceive greatly depends on what we’re taught to see, what we expect and pay attention to, and what we value. Other minds create other worlds.

 

We also depend, of course, on what nature gives us. For example, our eyes can perceive only a tiny fraction of available light. The possibly visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum is so wide, ranging in wavelength from “less than one billionth of a meter to more than a thousand meters,” says Ornstein. But the human eye can detect only a tiny part of that, only 400-700 billionths of a meter.

 

For humans, ultraviolet light is barely perceptible. Ed Yong, in his wonderful book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, says ultraviolet is “an invisible hue just on the edge of our vision—a perceptual void that our imaginations are keen to fill.” But to bees, some fish as well as reindeer, dogs, cats, etc. UV signals are common.

 

So, thinking of our eyes as only windows to the world is a limited metaphor. We’re not merely windows; we’re not, as some would say, merely mechanical processes. And we’re not separate from the world we sculpt. How we think about reality strongly influences our ability to act in it. How we think about our ability to make choices influences how well and what we choose. This is so crucial to recognize. If we think we have no role, we create a world in which we’re powerless. Getting us to think we’re powerless in shaping what we see is a belief propagated by autocrats to enable them to control us….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Aging Isn’t an Illness to Recover From: Lowering Our Resistance to Living with Kindness

As I get older, I realize the images and expectations I once held of “old” people were distorted. We are not those images. I can do so much more now at 65, 75 and older than I once expected I could do. And I sort of laugh gleefully. Aging is a more complex, engaging experience than I ever realized before.

 

The same applies to facing death. Our culture has a prohibition against speaking openly about the subject, which can be so damaging and isolating to us all.

 

I once imagined being older was a time of increasing feebleness or diminished capacities. That people spent more time looking backwards than forwards. And that except for maybe having more “free time,” there was nothing positive about it. A popular meme was “don’t trust anyone over thirty” ⎼ until my whole generation was way over thirty. I’ve found there’s plenty of looking back, but there’s even more of an appreciation of each moment now.

 

It’s true, however, that when I was younger, I might see a doctor once a year, at most. Lately, it’s almost every week. A frequent question that arises when I feel pain or physically “off” in some way, is whether the symptom is due to “normal aging,” or something else. In the past, when I was injured or developed some medical condition, I approached it as a problem to solve. Bodies could usually recover, injuries usually heal. But now, ankle or hand pain, for example, doesn’t heal as quickly as it once did, or at all.

 

Aging isn’t an illness to recover from. But our attitude or understanding of it is another story. We hopefully re-learn daily who we are. We re-learn what change means, what living means, that living is change. To even breathe we change, every second, taking in, letting go.

 

And as we get older, so many of those we know leave the world before us. I remember my father, who lived to be exactly 96.5, saying, “I’m the last of my friends, and the last of my relatives from my generation.” There’s an awful pain and loneliness in this. In each friend or loved one’s death we can feel friendship dying in us. We can feel loving is dying; loving is being vulnerable. To love is to make ourselves vulnerable to loss, yet we do it anyway. Dying is there in the loving itself; the two are almost indistinguishable.

 

So, every once and awhile now, I look up and see the reality of death getting closer. I can’t claim I’ve accepted it. Surprisingly, it doesn’t depress me, despite the moments when I experience intense fear. Or when I realize everything beyond what I can see in front of me right now, beyond what anyone can see, is an unknown we haven’t yet learned how to embrace or face. Maybe death is there as a sign, or a reminder, a message from reality.

 

And this reality touches and hopefully improves my relationship with everyone, with good friends and relatives, and especially my wife. My wife and I have been together for so many years, and the commitment to each other is as real, as clear as anything could be. As wonderful. As present. There is less judgment. Less impulse to distance. Just feeling.

 

Yet, different ways to trick myself into ignoring the reality of death still occasionally leap into mind….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.