Expand - Contract

One of my favorite psychologists is Jean Piaget. He had a lot of interesting ideas, but the one I like best is his idea about stages of development. This idea was intended to explain why young kids cannot do certain things, while older kids can. And that kids learn differently as they get older (using sensations and movement, then objects, then ever more abstract). Along with the idea that kids learn differently, the description is that kids also tend to view themselves alternately as “the center of the Universe” and “a being among the rest of the beings, or one among many.”

I just turned 50 this year, and this construction of a pendulum swing between ego/exo-centrism seems to explain a lot.

My understanding of the world, and places in the world, are based a lot on who else I know there, and locations and existence of landmarks. Landmarks, you know, like buildings, bodies of water, other seemingly immovable objects. Lets call these “anchors” for the sake of this discussion. The number of these anchors seem to expand and contract.

As one example, let’s take a concise year of my life: August 1989 - July 1990. During this year, I lived in Switzerland. I lived with a family in a house in a town, and went to a school in another town, with a faculty of teachers and administrators. Even the world was a certain way (the countries of the world, for example).

As time goes on, lots of those anchors change, disappear, die, get torn down, etc. Even during the time I was there, some huge things changed. The Berlin Wall came down, the dictator of Romania was executed on live TV in Romania. To name a couple that might have made the world-wide news. My host mom’s dad died while I was there.

But, then as more time goes along, some of the personal anchors start to change. The school has subsequently built another level onto itself, the town built a parking garage on the plot where there was a soccer field right next to my house. The soccer field is now on top of the garage. Then even more personal, my host mom died. My host mom’s aunt died. Both of my grandmothers died. My host sister died. My host brother got married, and had four kids. My younger host brother moved to Berlin to manage a restaurant.

I don’t know why, but at some point in my life I kinda figured “this is how it’s supposed to be”. And I guess that (to get back to the main point of this note) is when I switched from exo-centric to ego-centric. This is how it is supposed to be. Thus ever, infinitum, amen.

There has been a suffering in my heart that has come every time I heard about another major transition in life.

It’s like a feeling that my external existence is being slowly erased. Every person who dies, who I knew, is one less person who can testify to my existence. And once those folks are all gone, maybe I don’t exist any more?

And when the location objects all change or disappear, my mental existence or memories of a place start to seem like self-gaslighting. Didn’t there used to be a gas station and a print shop here? Now all I see is a Starbucks and a giant apartment complex…

As more and more of these anchors change or die or disappear, it can start to seem like the place no longer has a place for you. I cooked at a frat house from 2004 to 2005. That frathouse is gone. Another one is in its place (same fraternity is in it, they demolished the old house and built a new one in its place). The main drag through town in Ames, where I went to Grad School, is almost unrecognizable. Lots of buildings gone and replaced with newer ones. Lots of favorite businesses gone, and new ones in their place.

Sometimes the erasure happens faster than others. For example, within about a year of me leaving the IT position at Iowa State’s College of Education, there was no remnant of my time there. None of the server names remained, none of the webpages I created were current and were replaced, etc. And THEN the whole College disappeared. College of Education and College of Family and Consumer Sciences merged into the College of Human Studies…

One of my favorite professors was Roger Volker. He said that there comes a time when a place isn’t a place for you anymore. He mentioned visiting his frat house after he graduated. For the year or two after graduation, there were still folks there that he knew well, but fewer of them remain. ANd then after 4-5 years, nobody knows you anymore. He said that’s probably for the best. Your job is to get out there and do things, not sit in remembrance of glories (or inglories?) past.

at some point, it's time for you to make place on the world stage and enter the realm of memories.

So, it’s part of reality that people die, and people who you know well will die too. The places you lived will change, or disappear, or get demolished to make way for something newer. And if you outlive your spouse, or even some of your kids, that’s a whole other kind of suffering. And at some point, it’s time for you to make place on the world stage and enter the realm of memories.

This past year with COVID isolation, and the very public debate between folks who want to get protected from the disease, and those who want to be allowed to make that choice for themselves, has been hard in an existential way. Just before COVID, Nicki fought like a warrior to assure that her dad could live at home with us. ANd then just as we were getting him settled and into a routine, he died.

He wasn’t my dad, but it resonated with me. It was an emptiness in everyone’s heart. It was a long, strenuous fight, and we selected a more suitable home to live in, to give him a more comfortable situation for living with us.

A person may need to feel like their effort, or struggle, or excitement, or pain means something to the greater world.

...And the irony is that NOBODY outside yourself will even know you are in pain unless they are told.

I think I’m going around in circles here, but my point is that sometimes your world expands (with you at the center) and some times it contracts (to reveal that you never were really the center.)

Maybe the whole sense of reality is about trying to find one’s “place” in it. A person may need to feel like their effort, or struggle, or excitement, or pain means something to the greater world. And the irony is that NOBODY outside yourself will even know you are in pain unless they are told. Because we are ALL just individuals unless we put in the work to join or develop a society. And maybe a depression sets in when huge swaths of the prior understanding is just gone (changed, dead, or destroyed and replaced)?

And maybe a person gets to a critical point in their life, where they stop trying to expand their society (Network?) because to do so means extra work, and makes extra tethers on a person’s emotions? Maybe they shut themselves off, because they have the notion that reducing the number of friends and associates is a way to reduce the pain of losing them, or the amount of effort needed to make true friends.

To this person, being outside of societies might mean a future absence of pain because nothing they care about can go away, die, or get detroyed and replaced… I don’t know…

Maybe they feel that they can put a stake in the ground, and from that point forward there is nothing that they care about that will change? Just hypotheses…

In any event, you start off with zero friends, you grow a network of understanding through other people and objects in time and space, and then that network decays. If a person doesnt do the work to build and maintain their network, they may at some point find themselves in a world that is utterly incomprehensible.

So, when a movie is shown where a notable figure from the past is brought to the Present (their far future), I really don’t know how they can make sense of things. Wouldn’t it break their brain to be tossed unprepared into sensory overload? I mean, their sensory filters attuned to their own place in time would not be able to know what to attend to and what to ignore. And the noise of modern life… holy moly. Maybe there have been multiple attempts to send people ahead in time that all resulted in insanity? (Now I’m just being silly)

Long and short: It can be very easy to lose a handle on reality if you allow yourself to miss a few beats. Another example of my friend Ahmed’s wisdom: Life is like a merry-go-round that is slowly accelerating. You can get off if you like, but it won’t be easy to get back on. And if you stay off long enough, you die.

Tend those networks, folks, or know that they will decay, wither, and disappear into nothingness…

Ring the Zen bell

Comments?