mahiwaga

I ran across this phrase on a random blog, and this phrase happens to be a major tenet of Buddhism. I have waxed philosophically much about the Art of Not Wanting and it is such a tricky thing. As I’ve noted, this particular state of bliss has nothing to do with the avolitional state which undergirds atypical depression and schizophrenia. Instead of a lack, an emptiness, the Art of Not Wanting is a sense of completion.

To put it another way: “What I am is sufficient for this moment.”

I’ve gotten a hang of avolition. There are days where, if I don’t just sit in front of this cursed lcd panel typing random search queries into Google, I will instead lie in bed and hope that I fall asleep.

I realize that this is incredibly pathetic, and what’s more, a good sign that I am, in fact, still depressed. It’s no longer the horrific aching that is the beginning of the dark road to suicidal ideation. It’s just this dull emptiness, this sense of not giving a crap about myself, and knowing that no one else cares about me either. OK, objectively speaking, I know this is a lie. I’m pretty sure my mom would be upset if I offed myself. And my friends would hate me for such cowardly selfishness. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t care enough about myself to take good care of myself, and as we all know, if you don’t love yourself, how can you love anyone else?

So it all comes together. The Art of Not Wanting is all about learning to love yourself (which is The Greatest Love of All™) What I am is sufficient for this moment. Right now, I will be enough.

This does not mean that I shouldn’t grow and change. (If anything, mastering the Art of Not Wanting should lead to extensive growth and extreme changes.) What it means is that self-loathing is useless. Whatever it is that I need to face, I will face it with courage, using all that I am to fight my way through. This is not to say that I cannot fail. But failure is a symptom that I am not envisioning the world rightly and I need to try something different. Failure cannot define who I am unless I let it. I can try and fail and not be a failure.

The first step, I guess, is to not be afraid of failing. Because what I am now will be enough. Maybe I won’t succeed, but it will probably be because I’ll be trying to solve the wrong problem and not because I am stupid, insane, and worthless.

In this vein, I recognize the value of religion. Whatever faith you believe in, it allows you to recognize your intrinsic self-worth. In Catholicism, you can say to yourself that you are a child of God, meaning, no matter what, you have value. To put it more tritely than that, I am special. (Just like everyone else.)

So: (1) What I am is sufficient for this moment. (2) Failing is a method that will help me recognize that I am looking at the situation wrongly. It is a way to lift the veil off my eyes. It cannot define my worth, because my value is intrinsic in my existence.

If I can just pound these things into my soft, mushy brain, I just may have a shot at life.

Despite my rhetoric of never wanting to fit in, of always wanting to be strikingly unique, of striving to stand out, to make my own unique mark on the world, I am burdened by evolutionary baggage. Like it or not, human beings long to belong. To be one of the tribe.

I suppose this is what drew us so close to dogs (or their ancestors, wolves.) They can only really exist in packs, with a strict hierarchy in place. (Which, incidentally, is something that dogs have not really escaped. Even if you only have one dog. He or she will identify themself as part of your pack.)

Many philosophers decry this instinct foisted upon us by evolution. It is our nature to trust to hierarchy. It’s the reason why someone, with enough treachery, can get us to trust in their ability to lead, even if they don’t really have that ability. It’s also the reason why people are loathe to expel such leaders, because, regardless of everything else, they are on the superior pole of the hierarchy. It explains why otherwise reasonable people followed the Nazis and committed atrocities, as they were “only following orders.” It also explains the neocon death cult which currently grips the Republican Party and holds the entire country hostage.

Better minds than mine have pointed out the intrinsic tension in all human beings. It can be simplified, reified, into the opposition of the desire for freedom and liberty, and the desire for security and stability. Individuality, uniqueness, striking out on your own—these things belong to the former. Hierarchy and trust in authority belong to the latter. And everyone falls somewhere along that spectrum.

Clearly, I lie somewhere closer to the former. I have met very few people who have such an innate distrust of authority as I do, and often fear that I am completely unreasonable in my unrelenting suspicion. I like to blame my father, who is basically an anarchist. He has never claimed any political label, although he is registered to no party. His stories speak for themselves. He never says so outright, but it is clear that he has utter contempt for hierarchy and does his best to avoid the scrutiny of the power structure. I wonder how he developed this sensibility. I wonder if it’s simply the fact that he was a poor person living amidst the rich, in a country where the rich habitually victimized the poor. The political system in the Philippines is frequently described, even in the 21st century, as semi-feudal. The rich own all the land. The poor only rent, and thus they are really basically serfs. The middle class scarcely exists. And there really has never been any momentum for revolution, partly because the CIA has always interfered so strongly because of the fear of a Communist uprising, and partly because there is the escape valve of emigration and overseas contract work. The people who would be the middle class leave for richer pastures like the U.S. and Europe. Scholars of Asian American Studies speak of the brain-drain generation of the 1960s, when scientists, engineers, physicians, and nurses left the Philippines in droves, seeking that vaunted better life elsewhere. There has never been any incentive to pull the Philippines out of the Middle Ages.

That’s my theory about my dad’s anarchist tendencies. I’ve never called him on it, although we talk a lot about politics. He is basically extremely cynical about human nature, and is not surprised about the extent of the corruption gnawing away at the fabric of the United States. It’s all par for the course. Especially coming from a developing country where corruption was a basic fact of life.

That said: being an anarchist is a difficult lifestyle to lead. Realistically, I’m more of a democratic socialist in terms of my political stances, but if I could choose my ideal political system, it would be utopian anarchy. What this means is not outright chaos and jungle law, but a world where laws were unnecessary because they were redundant. Every person is able to do the calculus that balances their own wants with the wants of others, and every conflict is managed in a case by case manner by people who are peers. Hierarchy would not exist in my fantasy world.

Human nature being what it is, this is extremely improbably, and possibly simply absurd and insane. But deep down inside, I like to believe that people are mostly good. Although I know it’s not true. Like most things, I tend to hope for the best, but prepare to expect the worst.

To parse it out, what this means is that I wouldn’t be a staunch ally to insurrectionists when the revolution actually hits. I’m not a big fan of destroying one hierarchy simply to install a different one, and that’s what previous revolutions have typically involved. I have, for some reason, taken Douglas Adams’ admonition about power and leadership to heart, even though he probably meant it tongue-in-cheek. I really believe that the people who seek power are exactly the people who should be prevented from ever achieving power. If we could somehow conscript people who have good leadership qualities but aren’t power hungry. Fantasy, I know.

But I have digressed quite far from my original intent for this post. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve always striven to be outside of the statistical mean. But the problem is that most sensible people don’t trust the outliers. People with my mindset naturally become loners, traversing the places that other people would rather never see. Except that I’m not a very good loner. I have not been able to completely supress my desire to belong.

It would probably help if I had more orthodox views about life, the universe, and everything, but I am who I am, for better or for worse, and it would be quite difficult and probably undesirable for me to compromise my beliefs (however wild and impossible they may be.) But I can’t help but feel that outliers have a hard time meeting other people, by definition. To put it baldly, outliers don’t get very many dates.

I suppose my only hope is to find someone who shares the same delusions and wacky fantasies as I do. (I must say that I have actually met at least one candidate, but there is the thorny predicament of needing her to actually be interested in me in That Way™) This, by very definition, is tough to do as an outlier. This means that you are not part of the 66.7% of the population that cluster around the mean. (With that percentage in mind, it should not surprise you that I am an introvert, who, as a group, only make up one-third of the general population.) So at best I’ve got a 16.67% chance (assuming that genders are divided roughly 50-50, and that I’m not going to become bisexual. I know that statistically speaking, there are more women than men, but it seems I’ve never been able to take advantage of that disparity.) And then you start adding in all sorts of confounding factors like distance and language-barriers and culturally-bound prejudices, and it’s clear that the actual chances are less than that 16.67%.

From a purely statistical standpoint, my chances of meeting the right woman don’t seem very favorable from the outset.

Why do I even think about these ridiculous things?

I don’t know why I worry so much about things that haven’t happened yet, and aren’t going to happen any time soon. It’s not like I can do anything now to mitigate whatever will happen.

The interesting thing about medical training is the emphasis on the teaching aspect. I mean, most of medicine (at least if you’re not a surgeon) is about teaching—educating people about their diagnoses, about possible treatment plans, about the natural course of their condition, about what things to expect, what things to be concerned about, what things they need to call about, or head to the emergency department for. In peds most of all, a lot of the teaching is about what is normal, what not to worry about. This is no surprise. After all, the word “doctor” is simply Latin for “teacher.”

The more immediate aspect is the fact that I will have my first real supervisory month in a little more than a week. I’m not worried about not knowing my medical knowledge, about looking like an idiot in front of my interns and medical students. I’m humble enough to know that the sum of my ignorance far exceeds the sum of my knowledge. What I worry about is that I don’t want to infect them with my pervasive sense of cynicism. It’s one thing if they’re already cynical (which would not be all that surprising since it is the end of the academic year), but as much as I sometimes detest optimists and their naivete, I don’t want to be the one to tear their world down. If they’re still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, who am I to put a monkey-wrench in their universe?

Still, I suppose it is much like dealing with patients. Especially when the diagnosis is something awful like metastatic cancer, or anoxic brain injury, where the prognosis is hopeless. Sometimes you have the unenviable role of forcing them (or their loved ones) to face reality.

I have been perhaps lucky in that all my patients and their loved ones in such dire straits thus far have been extraordinarily brave. As the end comes closer, I’ve found that people become more sober and realistic. I have never sensed any opposition when the question finally came down to actually pulling the plug. There is always wailing and gnashing of teeth, but, as has been said, not all tears are an evil.

So if I’m cynical, then so be it. Seeing death too many times forces one to adapt extreme forms of coping, and ultimately, you’ve got to protect yourself. Because if you can’t take care of yourself, how can you take care of other people?

In retrospect, I think of one of my favorite residents, who is also one of my heroes, and she is equal parts hardened cynicism and daring hope. If she were simply just cynical, there is no way she would want to perform the extraordinary life-saving measures that she excels at. But if she were just naievely hopeful, there is no way she could survive the onslaught of tragedy that is part and parcel of dealing with the very sick. I’m really glad that I got to work with her. She taught me a lot about being a good doctor, and hopefully I can manage to be at least a tenth as good as she is.

Times like this, I’m tempted to echo Charles Barkley and say that I’m no role model. But these things are rarely choices. For the most part, they get foisted on you. Now that I think about it, I’ve been a role model from the start, as unwitting as I was. This is the plain consequence of being the eldest child. I like to hope that I’ve been a decent older brother to my sibs. And I know that for better or for worse, at least during their childhood, they’ve used me as some kind of measuring stick (undoubtedly leading to all sorts of psychological trauma.) I hope that I’ve been more forgiving than my mother, who is a woman who is impossible to please and who needs to always be in control, even of things that no sane human being could be in control of. I hope that I’ve been more engaged than my father, who has such a devil-may-care attitude to life, and who often comes across very convincingly as someone who doesn’t gives a rat’s ass.

Despite my rather unflattering portrayal of my parents, from wisdom obtained from distance and from trying to carve my own niche in this world, I have grown to truly love them for who they are, in a manner more closely approximating parity (I say approximating, because they will always and forever be my parents.) I’m not saying that I’m a successfully independent human being, but what I do know is that it’s been a long time since they’ve been able to successfully protect me from the trials and tribulations of the world, and well into my childhood, they would actually sometimes look to me to make important decisions and to provide needed knowledge to situations. Maybe it’s just the archetypal role of the eldest child of immigrant parents. I even wrote this in my personal statement when I was applying for medical school: in many ways, I’ve felt like I’ve been a conduit, a bridge, a mediator, forever translating different weltanschaungs to try to get people into agreement. That’s frequently the role of the primary care physician as well: to get the patients to understand all the medical gobbledygook handed to them by specialists, and to get the specialists to understand the idiosyncracies of your patients, because you will the one who knows them best. I am but a messenger, a mountebank. So be it.

But I ramble endlessly on and on.