What’s cool is to be in this abstract thing called the present, which means pissing on the past and giving the finger to the future. Can’t all three just get along?
Yesterday morning, two men who carefully planned where they were going and knew precisely the result of their goings had a conversation on Bangkok’s BTS Skytrain.
Man 1: Look, man, I know I’ll get promoted if I just keep paying my dues, you know.
Man 2: For sure, for sure. I was just saying don’t forget to live in the present.
Man 1: So true, man. That’s so wise.
Man 2: I get caught in the future, too. You just gotta be where you’re at, you know?
Man 1: Absolutely. Be in the now. Live in the moment.
This is the way it often works within some hierarchical games of religion, philosophy, and life: whoever can say old ideas in cool and/or emphatic ways advances. Bonus points are awarded if you can say cool things and be emphatic enough to sweat or cry at the same time you say them. If you’ve memorized cool phrases, you’re wise. And if you can get a lifelong paraplegic to stand from a wheelchair, well then.
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Charlene Sunkel has been diagnosed with schizophrenia but has become South Africa’s premier mental health awareness spokeswoman and certainly one of its most interesting. She’s the Awareness, Advocacy & Communications Officer for the Central Gauteng Mental Health Society. As a speaker, she debunks many of the myths surrounding those who have mental illness while also helping those afflicted realize that their diagnosis is not a death sentence. Charlene is also a playwright, and mental health issues stand at the forefront of her work. I met her at a Wellcome Trust conference on Community Engagement a few weeks ago. During dinner one night, she told me a story of a major religious figure who came to South Africa, and how many people agreed to fake being a paraplegic during his sermon for the sake of a few bucks. The next evening she debuted the short-film adaptation of her play, Two Beds…Madness Revealed. The group of 30 people from mixed academic backgrounds—neuroscientists, poets, ethics professors—was enthralled. Conversations were sparked. Where is the line between being a terrific religious preacher and being an insane religious preacher? Why do so many who embrace religion still truly believe (and treat accordingly) that a person with a mental health illness must be possessed by some evil spirits? Or, as karma says, that they were bad at some point in their actual past or in the past of one of their previous lives? What are some of the driving forces behind why men are so unlikely to admit the need for and then receive help for mental health problems? A few days later I followed up with Charlene regarding the latter.
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I definitely think men are less likely than women to go to therapy or counseling,” she began. “The degree to which men oppose the idea of therapy or counseling differs from country to country, culture to culture, religion to religion, but most commonly men cling onto the perception that ‘men don’t cry’; therefore, men cannot show emotion or admit to having emotional or otherwise internal problems.
I thought about this from an evolutionary perspective. Men have always used, and been relied upon by others to use, their physicality to hunt, build, and to protect self and those weaker. Could it be, in combination with the historical perception that Charlene mentioned, that the intense emphasis on body, both in action and presentation, has led to men being biologically less capable or less intuitively aware of their mental health? I asked her if anything has changed regarding men throughout her career in the mental health field.
Sure, times have changed, and this perception is not as prominent anymore as psychology and psychiatry become more accepted into the health field as an actual health matter like diabetes or high blood pressure. But the stigma attached to mental illness is still there which results in people in general failing to seek help, more so for men. Men are still seen as the head of the family, the one who is strong and looks after his people (at least in most instances) and going to therapy or counseling implies that the man can then not be ‘the man.’ It is often society that places this unreasonable pressure on men to not show emotion or be allowed to have mental health problems. I respect men who do own what they feel—those open and strong enough to share when they experience emotional or mental health difficulties.
Soldiers are notorious for coming back from service and not accepting help. A few years ago a soldier from my hometown returned from duty, walked into a fast food chain, and gunned down both workers. He thought he was at war. War can warp even those seemingly unaffected. Some form of counseling and therapy shouldn’t just be offered to soldiers; it should be mandatory. I’m as much a fan of science as the next dude, but when I see scientists I’m friends with getting $30,000 grants to see which brand of diaper holds the most urine while those soldiers who return from duty and actually seek therapy can’t afford it, I start to feel my temples pulse.
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Right now in America, Buddhism is akin to carrying a Gucci purse with a Chihuahua in it. It’s hot; it’s cool to be Buddhist.
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Right now in America, Buddhism is akin to carrying a Gucci purse with a Chihuahua in it. It’s hot; it’s cool to be Buddhist. I admit; I study elements of Buddhism because I feel it has practical applications regarding patience and open-mindedness. But Buddhism’s been heating up for the past 20 or so years, which is to say there’s been a game going down in our culture called: “Who can say basic Buddhist ideas in the stickiest way?” By sticky I mean like the hook of a Black Eyed Peas song, the one that gets stuck in your head for days. Of course, those with the talent to live in letters become cream of the crop when it comes to being sticky. Eckhart Tolle has this talent and has positively impacted thousands, even millions, of people. His book The Power of Now is the perfect example of how stickiness spreads.
“You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present.” (Tolle, The Power of Now)
So, not only are men dealing with perceptions, stigma, and perhaps biological deficits, they are also living in a 21st century society of past-bashers. Millions of copies of books are being sold that essentially speak of not taking the time necessary to intensely delve into the past. It’s not hip. What’s cool is to be in this abstract thing called the present, which, I suppose, means pissing on the past and giving the finger to the future. Why either-or? Can’t all three just get along? It seems His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama would agree. Acclaimed writer Ander Monson seems too as well.
Ander’s latest book Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir was called the “Future of the Book” in an article for The New York Times. I caught up with him to get his thoughts on the matter.
I’m not sure that I believe in ‘living in the moment’ (partly because it strikes me as a desiccated piece of language/ideology, that I don’t think means anything anymore: like ‘no fear’). I’m also not sure it’s possible to live in the moment, given the way that we almost immediately narratize our experiences—that is, we experience something but the only part of that we remember is our memory of it, which is formed and narratized almost immediately. This is why, for instance, they gave me a drug that prevents the creation of short-term memories when I had my colonoscopy. I probably suffered during it, I have no doubt, but I have zero memory of it. Very weird and disruptive. So all we have, is, I think, reflection. And writing is a rarified form of reflection—a purer one, memory and experience as filtered through the technology of language—of the essay. We write to know what we think; that’s a commonplace of freshman comp. But it’s true. It’s only through exteriorizing and trying to angle on experience that we actually get anywhere with it.
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Ander’s mention of the writing process reminded me of Chekhov’s “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” How, as we write well, we are not telling our stories, we are showing them, and to show means to relive a past experience, or an imagined experience shaped by past experiences, so fully that we capture the image in our mind and recall it over and over again to get that image to paper in a way that conveys it as close to “just right” as possible. That’s totally The Power of Then. I thought of Emerson’s “All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.” Nothing is really new; it’s simply the old wrapped in the new’s clothing. Then I mulled on James Michener’s “I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.” To rewrite, to strive for that “just rightness,” especially in memoirist writings, allows writing to be the tool for internal digging, but unlike counseling, it doesn’t impose the limitations that can arise from sharing with another person: embarrassment, lies, denial, etc. In this sense, it seems that writing-therapy should be used in addition to the more traditional therapy methods. It should be like a supplement in a healthy diet—there, just in case.
Regarding why the present-speak is catching on, Ander said:
I think the appeal of ‘being in the present’ is the push to savor immediacy, to live sensually, to live without the constraints of how we think we ought to live or think others think we ought to live. It’s also the powerful appeal of feeling that we are capable of anything, at any moment. But we’re not. Of course we’re not. We are who we always were. We’re contained in that self. We contain that self. Not to say that we can’t, in thinking about and reflecting on the self, come to some sort of understanding about ourselves and perhaps become wiser about what we’ve experienced or who we are. Though I think that’s illusory too, that certainty. It’s constantly slipping away from us. But I think the only thing to do is try for it.
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“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.” (Tolle, Stillness Speaks)
Realizing who we are, if that’s possible, and especially if we are categorizing it into “levels of deepness,” must grow out of the lifelong process of reflection.
When we instinctually yell while riding a roller-coaster we are in the present and that we were raised in a single parent household matters little in that moment.
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Perhaps Toole’s stickiest:
“The past has no power over the present moment.”
On one philosophical level, I see the point. When we instinctually yell while riding a roller-coaster we are in the present and that we were raised in a single parent household matters little in that moment. On a level that matters, in terms of actual reality, our past and our understanding of it has much power over our present and heavily influences our future choices.
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—Photo randychiu/Flickr