Be Willing to Have it So
Be Willing to Have it So
Frederico chases mice in his sleep. And when he does, the paws twitch. The thinnest black lips draw back. You can watch him there in your lap, knowing humans aren’t the only creatures with imagination. Some clever scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute even developed a way to detect neural activity in the hippocampus of rats that corresponds to spatial representations — evidence, in other words, that a rat can represent something that isn’t immediately before it. Perhaps a pathway it has taken to food. Perhaps the rat is even conjuring the food itself. The object needn’t be there for some version of it to exist in the mind of the dreamer. Objects like, say, the abstract concept of cheese rather than a real, touchable, aromatic bit of it before its nose. Frederico’s mouse does not exist in the room. But that does not mean it is unreal.
Which, I suppose, is proof that we humans aren’t the only creatures with at least a rudimentary ability to think in the abstract. Where we might be alone, though — and this is the hill upon which I will plant my flag, until you can talk me out of it — is in our peculiar blessing, or perhaps our curse, of being able not just to imagine what is not there, but our damnable insistence that things ought to be perfect Platonic Forms. For Freddy, I reckon, he chases abstract mice; we, on the other hand, get interrupted by some lout in a staff meeting and think how that shouldn’t be allowed to happen, and we seethe.
Freddy the Cat creates the mouse and that’s good enough for his purposes. We see a mouse the way all mice ought to be and awaken ticked off that things aren’t as good as we see them in those imaginations.. Like my friend Segismundo in Brazil who remains a teetotaler for weeks — even, sometimes, months, at a time. A good guy. The thing is that you can tell about a week or so before he goes off the deep end, even if he is the only one who cannot seem to see it himself yet. He starts talking about moving. Moving to Cuiabá. Or packing his sophisticated printer in the car and starting out all over in Belo Horizonte because he just couldn’t get a break at home where things were twisted. It would all be all right if he just went to a place where things worked out as they should.
There was just a mouse there. Hmmm.
Thing is, Segismundo seems to bring a lingering rightness or wrongness to the equation that weighs not at all upon Frederico when he awakens, and, finding no mouse after all, proceeds to take meticulous care of his toilette. That while Segismundo feels wronged, the door of the should have slammed in his face.
It makes me want to show Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book to Segismundo , Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, where the astrophysicist writes, “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
My faults
A guy called Howard McAllister of the University of Hawaii estimated that the world’s beaches contain roughly 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on the world’s beaches. As incomprehensible as that number is to brains evolved for the purpose of selecting berries and hunting for game, it’s not larger than the number of my shortcomings. So who was I to point out to Segismundo the foolishness of his pursuit. I had to settle for running through such a conversation only in my head.
“Segis,” I’d say. “Let me ask you: How many times have you gone to a new town? Like Anapolis. And didn’t you live in Americana for a couple of months? Oh, and last year you tried out Iturama but it didn’t quite work out. So, like, how many towns, one after the other, have failed to live up to expectations?”
He’d look at me suspiciously, sensing that I was laying a trap. But he’d answer so as not to seem defensive. “I don’t know. Three. Four,” he’d say.
I’d accept that the way I accept a lapsed client telling me he had slipped and had just had the one beer at a concert before he’d thought better of it and extracted himself from anything worse. “All right,” I’d say. “None of them worked out?”
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“No.”
“But those towns are hundreds of kilometers apart. I mean, I can see one of them just being an unfortunate place. But all four — or dozens — of them?”
“Yeah,” Segismundo might say, by now not bothering to obfuscate the fact that he was strapping on his shin guards, facemask and cup. “Bad luck.”
“But there is one thing I can think of that all those towns had in common when they failed to live up to their promise,” I would say. “You, Dude. You’re the common thread.” I’d sit back, then. Wait for it to click. “You’re the one and only common factor all those towns share. You don’t suppose it might not be the towns that let you down but maybe something else? Hmmmm.”
But of course I’m not a close enough — nor a good enough — friend to break niceness for his sake. Better to hope he one day exhausts himself from ignoring the obvious and finally comes to the same conclusion without the prodding that could well not only fail to bring Segismundo to ask that question of himself, but could trip his Ego Perimeter Alarm. And that would mean transferring all the frustration he ought to feel toward himself onto me, implicating me in the self-righteous presumption that I had any right to launch such a hateful question at a hopeful man.
Enter Bill Jim
In my office, there’s a big picture of Carl Jung to remind me of the significance that throbs just beneath the surface of things. And there’s a little picture of William James dressed in a heavy Victorian greatcoat and broad-brimmed hat. It was long before he wrote the towering Varieties of Religious Experience. Before he basically invented psychological functionalism and became the first U.S. professor of psychology, James was in his 20s in the picture, on a scientific expedition into the jungle. On the trip that told him collecting rocks wasn’t, after all, his thing.
Years later, as the first professor of the new-fangled field of psychology at Harvard, James wrote about acceptance. A topic you and I, and certainly old Segismundo, can always improve on.
“Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”
So wait. When I first ran across this quaintly phrased aphorism, I admit I noted it and moved on too fast to the next shiny object, when I should have chewed a few more times. At least paused before roaring on to the succeeding paragraph. Rolled it around on my tongue for a moment before turning the page to the next mouthful. Just detached words, dismissible in their distance from anything to do with me. Lines as remote as a curator’s plaque beside some Dutchman’s painting, hanging beside a seascape in a museum. Nice thought, though.
It was later, facilitating nine hours per week of group sessions just off the lakeshore on the north end of Chicago, that another interpretation of acceptance was laid open to me. The reflexive pushback that surrender is failure. That giving something up is loss. After all, to surrender one’s grasp of the one ledge you have clung to while the flames inside the skyscraper roar and crackle and consume the furniture and computers and fabric-covered cubicle partitions inside would be more terrifying than letting go to trust that you’ll land in that big net, secured way down there by a bunch of firefighters. So often, giving up even a godawful ledge that’s seemed to keep us at least alive seems more of a concession than freedom from an untenable situation. Better to keep your cramping fingers fixed to that ledge than give up the thing that’s kept you beyond the reach of the crucible of flame on the other side of the office window.
But you never get even to the point of deciding whether to let go and lose face but at least not be dead if you cannot, will not, accept the fact that you’re in an unsustainable situation whose resolution involves a great deal of discomfort. That it doesn’t matter right now whether the maintenance crew should have hung No Smoking signs in the hallway months ago, and why can’t people just do their jobs? And who in the hell even chooses to make a world like that?
The first problem, of course, is being alive enough to be able to dash off your sternly worded letter of reprimand to Providence. Rage against the unfairness, if you must, Segismundo. Yes, it is patently unfair that circumstances brought you to this unenviable point, clinging by fingertips to the ledge.
You’ll notice, if I can draw your attention to a point a few feet further down the ledge, where a rather plump black cat is bathing with outstretched leg. In a moment, Frederico will stop and look up to see the raging flames still there on the other side of the window. And if I could with any confidence claim to know just what a cat is thinking at any given time, I would be the first of the human race to be able to do so — but I would guess his thought might be something like “Hmmmm. Fire.”
And he would jump off that ledge, firefighters or not. Because we live in a world where cats always land on their feet. It’s so unfair that I can’t do that.
