The recent death of Nelson Mandela and our collective awe of his life have me wondering again what it takes to survive. Mandela was unusually well equipped to survive conditions that would crush the rest of us, but extreme examples sometimes teach us about the common middle. Given basic civil rights, what tools does the common person need to survive? And how do we get those tools?
Darling, on your 60th birthday, after 35 years of a flourishing marriage, I love everything about you, but, honestly, I hardly know you. I thought I knew you. I know you better than anyone else, but I thought I knew lots of people well—until I read George Vaillant’s Triumphs of Experience. Now it’s clear. We don’t know nobody. No wonder you keep surprising me.
What alarmed me was their timing. The first person to notice me in the doorway of their family room was the baby in the corner of the crib in the corner of the room. She locked onto me long enough to tag me as a stranger and then let out a slow, cat-like wail—loud but empty of urgency. Her father, Mitch, who faced the half-curtained window while folding baby pajamas near the laundry basket on the floor, finished his folding and carefully laid the pajamas on one of the stacks on the table before turning first to the baby and then to me. Apparently he hadn’t heard his mother greet me at the front door and or the shuffle of my feet in the doorway, even though the TV was on mute. He lumbered over to hand the baby her stray bottle in the crib and crossed the room to show me in.
We still don’t know what’s driving the autism epidemic that began in the 1980’s, but the study of autism has taught us a lot about the social brain. The new concept of autism spectrum disorders describes the many ways our social brains can fail.
“You’re on my mind” is a loose figure of speech, until you play charades with your lover in a brain scanner. Then you understand that she is not only on your mind but in your brain, deep. And we know where. We can see you lighting up right in your private parts, right there in your putative mirror neuron system and your ventral medial prefrontal cortex. That’s empathy in action.
Read Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life (2013) if you want to study Atkinson at work on the process of novel making. This is her eighth novel in 18 years, and she clearly has mastered most aspects of the craft. But don’t read it to lose yourself in the compelling lives of her characters.
During most of our written history there was nothing illegal or immoral about civilized governments systematically ignoring the feelings, rights, and interests of slaves, children, women, and immigrants, to name just a few of the overlooked. And yet during the last century in the United States we’ve found ways to consider these groups worthy of legal protection, fair pay, the vote, equal education, the right to own property—worthy of being treated as human.
On August 31, 2012 the following piece of mine was published in the Episcopal Cafe. It triggered some heat, which, in the link, follows the piece .
Three years ago, after being served communion once again by my brother, the priest of St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, and reciting the Nicene Creed with my usual questions about what I really believe, I came home and wrote a creed I could believe.
The aim of this blog, “You’re on My Mind,” is to train our attentions on the front edge of the art and science of how we make contact, and how we keep contact—or lose it. This process of attachment is mostly an art, but more recently also a science. We make most of our contacts without understanding how we make them, or why.
