BACK FROM HAWAII, THOUGHTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LOVE AND FAMILY

We are just back from the Big Island of Hawaii where we got a chance to perform the infrequent role of hands-on grandparents to the fourteen-year-old Sebastian. Sebi, as he is called, is a very fine student and a very fine basketball player, and we do not get to see him nearly enough. In fact, since his birth we have only had a chance to spend time with him about six times including a memorable time with him in Saporo, Japan, when his father was teaching at a Japanese university, all told less than 40 days.

The fact is that in the 14 years since Sebi’s birth we have only spent a total of about 40 days with the entire family, son Scott, daughter-in-law Yumiko, and Sebi. Why that has been the case I will leave to subsequent explorations. What this trip has served to demonstrate to me is how important family contact is. We humans are not solitary creatures. We are not meant to be alone even if we have a tendency to introversion, as I do. An introvert I may be, but a hermit I am not.

Highest Form of Feeling

Being with other people is essential, but no other contact is more important than being with family. Love, not romantic love, but what we refer to as agape or divine love, is the highest form of interpersonal feeling we can imagine. Under ideal conditions, that is, when our spiritual practices are manifest in us at the highest level it is what we feel toward everyone. Until we can attain the ideal, however, it is the feeling that comes most naturally to us when we are with family.

Let me express this principle in another, equally crucial way. How can I experience love for others but not experience love for my family? It is true that our family members have the capacity to hurt us more easily and more deeply than others can because of the bonds we feel through the sense of shared inheritance and shared experience. We aren’t expecting hurtful behavior from other family members, and when it happens it can hit us very hard and leave scars that last a lifetime.

Power Translates To Responsibility

It is for these reasons that, I believe, that family members need to work as hard as they can to treat each other with compassion and forgiveness. Because each of us has the power to hurt another family member more easily than anyone else, that is the very reason that each of us has the responsibility to be especially gentle, especially understanding, and especially loving in family situations.

In summary, it was wonderful being with family for the last nine days. I found it very renewing—and the gorgeous Big Island of Hawaii wasn’t bad either.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

KEN WILBER BOOK IS INSPIRATION FOR MY OWN THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH

A friend lent me her copy of Grace And Grit, Spirituality And Healing In The Life And Death of Treya Killam Wilber by Ken Wilber, and reading the book has been a very moving experience for me. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is wrestling with the question of death and dying and especially anyone wrestling with the question of death and dying from cancer.

That said, please be advised that Grace and Grit is not easy reading at all as it deals in considerable detail with the five year struggle of Treya Killam Wilber, wife of the author, with the complications from a diagnosis of breast cancer, very possibly all the complications that are possible from this disease. To put it simply Treya went through hell before her death, and Ken was right there with her, the perfect caregiver, anyway damn close to it.

Diagnosis Within Weeks of Marriage

Treya, born Terry Killam, had the misfortune to be diagnosed with breast cancer within weeks of marrying Ken Wilber, noted philosopher and writer. Wilber writes extensively on the interconnections of the spiritual and physical worlds. Treya and Ken then spent the next five years dealing with Treya’s disease. Demonstrating immense courage, Treya tried a combination of conventional and unconventional medical approaches and spiritual practices, particularly of the Eastern variety. Her attempts to save herself included a prolonged round of treatments in Bonn, Germany. Eventually, however, the tumors infesting her body including her brain proved too much to overcome, and she died at home with her husband and other family members and friends by her side.

In putting the book together, Ken incorporated a number of passages from Treya’s journals and letters. Hence the book is a record of two points of view—of Treya, the victim, and of Ken, the principal caregiver. In this case, the approach serves to underscore just how close this husband and wife were during the entire ordeal, the one exception being a dark period at about the two-year anniversary when the two drew apart and became hostile toward each other. Ken even contemplated suicide during this highly stressful low point in their relationship.

Facing Up To My Own Mortality

For me, the book proved especially useful in helping me hone my view of the difficult subject of death. I have had to face up to my own mortality at different periods in my life—first when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the age of 27 in 1966. None of us like to think of our own mortality. We prefer to think of ourselves as never dying, of living forever. Death is all around us, but we are adept at ignoring it. We prefer to think that it will never happen to us. We’re going to go on indefinitely forever, right?

Now having gone through my second bone marrow transplant about six months ago, the subject has presented itself once again. No, I’m not going to live forever. Yes, I’m going to die. Being able to accept the inevitability of death has a certain liberating effect. Since it’s going to happen to me someday, there’s no sense dwelling on it. No sense worrying about it. And it’s not just going to happen to me. I am not being singled out. It‘s going to happen to everyone.

Rules of the Game of Life

These are the rules of the game called life. The fact of death is a common bond that all human beings share. You can feel remorse about it, and as a lover of life I do, but it makes no sense feeling hurt or spiteful or angry, even though all of us do experience these emotions at some point.

I confess that at times when the reality seems more than a little overwhelming, I take some solace from a game that I play on occasion. It’s a game I play entirely in my own mind so you are not likely to know I am playing it. Sometimes I bring the game into play at a public event or in a social situation, let’s say at a not entirely enjoyable party. The game involves looking at each of the people around me and thinking, “It’s not just my fate, but you’re not going to escape nor are you or you or you or you, etc. None of us are because we’re all mortal.”

Basis for World’s Religions

At this point I could attempt to come forward with some profound statements about how the fact of death is the basis for all of the world’s religions. The common bond of our mortality including the common fear of death has led almost all of us to seek solace and hope in the answers provided by established religion. In my case, long a believer in the power of reason including the scientific method I have of late seen more clearly the limitations of these approaches and conversely have found more answers in spiritual explorations.

I find it ironic that as an undergraduate taking a required History of Religions course I found Hinduism the most difficult of the major religions to understand and appreciate. Now I find this ancient religion the easiest to understand and appreciate—specifically the concept that God is in all of us. The divine lives in all of us, ready to be discovered when we have the inclination. The greatest manifestation of this reality is love.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. They’re both available from the sasaft website and also from the xlibris.com website. And now it’s off to the Big Island of Hawaii with wife Harriet and godson Stephen to see my son Scott, daughter-in-law Yumiko and grandson Sebi. Perhaps I’ll have more to say about this trip in my next posting.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft