Turning Points

Turning Points

by Marco M. Pardi

“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.” Albert Einstein. Interview. What Life Means to Einstein. Sylvester Viereck.

All comments are greatly welcomed and will receive a reply. All previous posts are open for comment.

Though it may not seem like it, I often laugh at myself. Of course, as the years pass the cause of the laughter shifts. Lately, at the end of my seventh decade on this super-sized petri dish we call Earth, I laugh when I remember that the things I’m thinking about are typical for my age; I must really be this old. That’s okay. One day I won’t be laughing, or remembering, or even breathing. Instead, I might be having an Aha moment in which I realize getting a day older was “not in the cards”. Dealer wins. Ain’t it always that way. But who or what is this mysterious dealer?

“You don’t know what you’re missing,”they say. (I underline they because they are usually as elusive as the dealer.) Of course I don’t know what I’m missing; that’s because I’m missing it. But how often do I – and here I’m using I in the grand sense that includes the reader – concoct fantasies of what might have been had I, or had I not {fill in the blank}? The silliest part of spending time like that is that, since I don’t know, there could be a universe of other possible actions/inactions and outcomes or maybe just one. Any of those possible actions/inactions would have yielded outcomes that would have ruled out my knowing about other outcomes, including the one I’m living now. I absolutely think the world of my daughter and grandchildren. But had I agreed to the serious requests to extend my time in the military I’m quite sure I would never have met the woman who became the mother and grandmother of these now wonderful people. My daughter and grandchildren would not exist, at least not in the form I know them today. But did refusing the military request and eventually meeting this particular woman mean I didn’t bring other children into existence? I don’t know. And likely never will. Thinking about it is a waste of time. If I get my hands on that f__cking dealer I’ll ……….

Some years ago I read a book titled What If. I had mixed feelings about doing so, but it did prove interesting as the author went into great depth about events in history. One event which particularly interested me, since I was there at the time, was the culmination of WWII in Europe. As the Allies swept across France and into Germany British Field Marshal Montgomery and American General Patton devised a strategy in which Montgomery, from the north, and Patton, from the south would exercise a swift pincer movement on Berlin, capturing the German High Command. Remaining German units in Eastern France and in Germany would be bypassed on the theory that they would collapse once the High Command was captured. But American General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, did not believe the encircled German units would easily surrender. And, he is said to have feared the British would reach Berlin first and claim credit for ending the war in Europe. He refused the pincer movement and ordered a diagonal sweep across Europe. The consensus is that this decision prolonged the war by 10 months, enabling the Germans to vastly accelerate their Final Solution, what we now call the Holocaust, resulting in the preventable deaths of multitudes and the sacrifice of Eastern Europe and half of Germany to the Soviets, approaching from the east.

We will never know which of the two purported reasons influenced Eisenhower more. We know only the outcome. We will also never know how he looked back on his decision, which he likely did.

Still, some people like to say, Hindsight is 20/20. It is NOT. For several years in the 1970’s I was a licensed consultant helping terminal patients and their families. One of the more common sentiments expressed by patients was a variation of, If only I had or If only I hadn’t. One lung cancer patient said, If only I hadn’t smoked for so long. I said, Okay, you did. But cancer often takes years to manifest. It could have been your first cigarette or your first pack. Or, it could have been one of the routine chest x-rays well meaning physicians administer to patients who smoke. There are people who develop lung cancer yet have never been around tobacco smoke at all. You do not know. We will not know. Beating yourself up now will not bring you the answer. And so we talked about now, about what her life and her family meant in its totality and its richness, not about could’a, would’a, should’a. (Note:I did not mention the many hours I had spent within arm’s reach of nuclear weapons. Those things were known to leak radiation)

My point in recounting this is that, as I sit here at 79, were I to look back at a decision I made at, say 29 and wring my hands and tear my hair over which way I chose then, I would be ignoring the 29 years of experience, learning, and development that brought me to that decision, and the 50 years that have happened between that decision and now and how those years have shaped the perspective, the instrument, that I now use to turn back to judge the person I was in the past. And that holds true for any judgmental exercise of the present remembering the past, no matter the time frame. Focusing on the decision and ignoring the context then and now is an error followed by a mistake.

Sure, there will be some who protest that this is a “Get out of jail free” card. It isn’t. In fact, it’s a call to much greater work, the work of discovering and understanding yourself in full context.

In explaining conceptual thought to college classes I used the example of Leonardo da Vinci bringing David out of a block of marble. (My mistake. It was Michelangelo. I apologize for writing this in haste. See Gary’s comments below) Leonardo had a mental image of David, and he walked up to this huge rectangular block and simply knocked off everything that was not David. Can we approach the confusing shape that is us and knock off everything we think is not us? Or would we be producing a person who never was? I think that until we are willing to examine every lump and every crevice we are living a fantasy. Not seeing something doesn’t mean it’s not there. And those things which we habitually do not see can be influencers and drivers of decisions we make, as we later might suspect when asked why we did something; I dunno.

Retirement can sometimes seem to be little more than habitually waking up in the morning. Forty years ago a student asked me if I believed in reincarnation. My immediate answer was, I reincarnate every instant. Being me is just a habit. Twenty years ago a former faculty colleague who knew that student socially told me she (the student) was still marveling over the thoughts my remark awakened.

Reading or hearing about the work involved in understanding the self some might say, Why bother, you’re going to die anyway.” That’s true and I have heard people say it. On the other hand, Socrates once said the unexamined life is not worth living. Sounds sensible. But, in an article published by Cambridge University in 2012, there are different views:

Extract

According to Socrates, an unexamined life is not worth living. This view is controversial. Is the unexamined life worth living or not? Most philosophers disagree about the answer. While some argue for the worthlessness of an unexamined life, others support the superfluity of self critical examination. In his recent article, Jamison pooh-poohed the claim that an unexamined life is not worth living. According to Jamison, not only is an unexamined life worth living; the rigorous examination of life should not be encouraged due to its possible negative effects on the participants and the entire society. In Jamison’s view, a consistent and unregulated examination of human life produces a feeling of ecstasy (a specie of spiritual feeling) in those who engage in it. The feeling, if allowed, could endanger both the thinker and the entire society. For Jamison, “once you get a taste of this kind of thing, you do not want to give it up”. Someone who engages in self-critical examination eventually becomes entangled with it. Socrates became entangled in dialectics, became unpopular, was accused of corrupting the youth and eventually sentenced to death.

---

TypeResearch ArticleInformationThink , Volume 11 , Issue 31 , Summer 2012 , pp. 97 – 103DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175612000073CopyrightCopyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2012

A cautionary note. I would guess Jamison did not have the full context of what Socrates taught or did not understand the political landscape in which he taught. Reading through Plato’s accounts of Socrates’ teachings, I would say a central message was, Don’t get caught up in the could have beens, would have beens, and should have beens. My neighborhood is laid out with many cul-de-sacs, some obvious, some not so. It’s easy to spot visitors; the car which just went that way is now coming back this way. Confusion, frustration, time wasted. What were thought to be turning points proved to be dead ends. Everyone is born equal. A nice sentiment in principle, but inaccurate in fact. There are those who will need guidance in exploring the neighborhood in which they live – their personhood. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (Awakened One), guided us to realize the neighborhood is infinite, it is Allness and therefore nothing in particular.

What do you think? I can’t count the times I’ve been told, You think too much. But over the years I’ve been fortunate in having as personal friends two eminent psychiatrists one of whom knew my family and both knew my work history. I won’t bore you with snippets from conversations, but I will attest that I’m fine. Driven at times, but fine. Of course, you may think otherwise.
Specializing in the study of Death & Dying, and teaching the subject in colleges, I’ve encountered many who say they want to simply die in their sleep. My answer has always been, What? You study all your life for the final exam and you want to sleep through it? Of course, I recognize that not all people study. And answers are neither right nor wrong; they just are.

But there is no escaping that we approach many turning points throughout our days. Do we choose to be the happy-go-lucky wanderer, or do we tie ourselves up in indecision, or do we examine who we are as we consider what appears to be a choice. I would love to read your thoughts. I think.
Note: This will not be on the test.