What happens when compassion hurts?

This is the edited transcript of a May 7 talk I gave to the nurses of UC Berkeley Health Services on surviving compassion fatigue. It occurs to me that it applies just as much to parents. Originally posted to the Greater Good blog.

I’m going to warn you: This is a somewhat difficult talk, full of paradoxes. I’m going to talk about the best in human nature and behavior, and also the worst. I’m going to talk about how human beings seem designed to care for each other, but also how the grind of daily care can be soul-destroying. And in the end, I hope to share my thoughts on how we can work with other people to bring out the good in each of us.

I’m an early riser, and I do most of my writing in the early morning. A month ago, I was walking to a coffee shop at 6:30 am, and I was doing what I often do during my early morning walks, which is to look around at the Victorians and hills and mist of the place where I live and think about how beautiful all of it is.

Without warning, I felt a blow on the back of my head, and someone ran past me holding a tire iron.

Raymond Proulx, 1923-2009

My grandfather died this week. The following is adapted from the first chapter of The Daddy Shift, for which I had interviewed him.

My great-grandfather was born in rural Quebec, Canada. At the age of twelve, he immigrated with his widowed mother and four sisters to Lowell, Massachusetts, and all of them started work in the city’s textile mills.

In Lowell, my great-grandfather married and had thirteen children. My grandfather, Raymond Proulx, was born in 1923. Starting at the age of eight, my grandfather worked side-by-side with his father at home, tending the garden that helped feed them and taking care of the pigs, chickens, and cows they kept.

I asked my grandfather what lessons he learned from his father. He replied: “You do what you have to, and if you don’t, you don’t eat.” Their relationship was not an intimate one. Discipline was strict and enforced with the back of a hand.

At fifteen, my grandfather found a job in a slaughterhouse butchering cows. He quit school and never went back. In 1945, he was drafted and served in World War II. In 1946, he married my grandmother and started work at a quarry—a job he would hold for the next forty years.

“My wife was so poor,” he said. “They didn’t have nothing. I took her out of poverty when I married her. At the quarry, I got fifty cents an hour, working like a horse. There wasn’t a union, we just worked. If you asked for a raise, you’d get four cents.”

A year later my mother was born; my two uncles both came within the following decade. “It was my wife’s responsibility to take care of the kids, and I used to go to work,” said my grandfather.

He told me that he wanted to play a role in their development—which he defined as making “sure they do what they’re supposed to do”—but the main measure of his success consisted of going to the quarry every day and putting a roof over their heads. “I used to go to work, come home. I didn’t drink at all. I didn’t spend my money foolishly. Everything went to feed the kids and the clothes.”

I never heard any of his children say otherwise; my mother says that she often saw my grandfather work seven days a week, for up to 12 hours a day. By the standards of his time and social class, my grandfather was an excellent father. He had been a soldier and a breadwinner and those were the two things he was proudest of. I had always had the impression that he defined those two roles by duty, modesty, and steadfastness.

His sacrifices were enormous, but my grandmother, Cecile Proulx, seemed almost crushed by the burdens of her life. I can’t include her voice here—she died years ago—but I have pictures and memories of a woman who seemed to be always battling against herself and the world, her lips set, her eyes fearful.

“She worked for me,” said my grandfather of his wife. “I always said, You work for me. She took care of the kids and I took care of the money; I brought it home, so she would have enough.” When I asked him if he faced any challenges in raising the kids, he replied: “I never did. My wife took care of all that. She brought the kids up.”

In reading through my college journals, I am surprised to see many small reminisces about my grandfather—though I didn’t see him more than twice during my undergraduate years, his appearances in my journals outnumber those about both my parents. In one entry, I recall an incident when he had accidentally killed a man at the quarry and we found him at the kitchen table, head in his hands; on another page, I describe a bicycle he built for me, “the best bike I ever had, the fastest in the neighborhood.”

We were never close. Why did I write about him so often? I think in many ways I was haunted by how different he seemed to be from me; I was quite simply incredulous that we were related. He apparently represented some rough masculine quality that I never had and didn’t want, but which still held the same attraction that the image of Havana seemed to have for the second-generation Cuban-Americans that I knew in my Miami high school. My friends had no desire to go back to Cuba—they felt their families led freer, richer lives in Miami—but they still romanticized Havana’s shark-finned cars and crumbling buildings, which cast a long shadow over their lives. My family had not crossed an ocean strait, but in many ways I was just as far away from my grandparents.

My grandfather died on January 7, 2009. Raymond Proulx didn’t want a funeral; the family isn’t having one.

Happiness and Its Ambiguities

I spent Monday at the “Happiness and Its Causes” conference in San Francisco, which was co-sponsored by my employer, the Greater Good Science Center. The title might suggest a shallow preoccupation with happiness for its own sake, and yet the morning panel was startlingly ambiguous and profound.

At one point, for example, psychologist Paul Ekman linked the recognition of suffering to the possibility of happiness, an insight that both science and religion have discovered using completely different tools. Buddhism and Darwin, he said, agree about the roots of compassion: If I see you suffering, that makes me suffer, therefore ending your suffering can cause me happiness. For Darwinians, this compassionate loop emerges because our biology wires us together; for Buddhism, we are linked through the spirit.

Later, Stanford University psychiatrist David Spiegel argued that Buddhism provided a similar insight about death, believing that the best way to deal with the idea of mortality is to make it familiar, something confirmed by a fair amount of empirical research. I later thought that you see similar processes at work in other religions--what is the image of Christ on the cross if not a reminder of our mortality? If we fear death too much, implied Spiegel, happiness is impossible. And, he said, suppressing sadness can prevent happiness.

Quite a few of the panelists actually argued that happiness should not be the ultimate goal of existence. Philosopher and psychologist Owen Flanagan paraphrased Kant: Happiness is one thing, being good is another. And indeed, he said, preaching contentment for its own sake only serves the interests of the powerful.

Spiegel went on to add that in bad times, the goal should be to convert corrosive emotions (that reinforce helplessness) into emotional states that provoke action or reflection: convert anxiety into fear, depression into sadness, illness into meaning. Happiness becomes possible only when we act or reflect, and try to make the world, if only our little world, a better place.

In the end, summarized moderator Alan Wallace (a Tibetan Buddhist scholar), true happiness is seeing reality for what it is. This might sound counterintuitive to some; the message we hear most often in our culture is that happiness is possible only when reality is viewed through rose-colored glasses. But Flanagan, Ekman, and Spiegel all agreed: Part of the challenge is to recognize the reality of limits and interconnectedness. Happiness, in short, is other people.

I thought about all this in relation to parenthood. I think most parents would agree that parenthood involves a certain amount of suffering. We see it in our children from the moment they enter the world weeping, and we feel it in ourselves, through sleepless nights and deferred desires. The biological and spiritual ties we feel with offspring are the most intense most of us will ever know. This can cause unhappiness on a day to day basis, and yet I think if those ties are allowed to grow over time, there is no deeper source of happiness.

[This is the revised version of a post to the Greater Good blog.]

The shelter of each other

Shortly after I started working full time again, Liko and I developed a tradition: On certain Sundays we take the F train downtown and we spend the afternoon watching hockey or figure skating, playing on the playground, going to museums, eating.

This past Sunday I took him ice skating. We had tried it about a year ago and I had concluded that it was too early. But on Sunday he took right to the ice, and we skated around and around the rink, holding hands, and neither of us could stop smiling.

Later we went to the playground and Liko hooked up with two little girls, twins, about six years old.

"Did you guys go ice skating?" he asked.

They nodded.

"Did you see me? I was really good!"

They laughed, as they should have, and ran to the slide. Liko chased them.

Later we rode the merry go round and I watched his face and I thought, I'm happy.

That night I put him to bed. "I love you, Dada," he said as he nodded off.

Then on Monday I read that the House voted to reject the $700 billion bailout package. Today I read that the war in Iraq continues to go badly; we're now losing the war in Afghanistan. An internal Justice Department investigation has concluded that White House fired federal prosecutors for political reasons, while a former CIA official pleads guilty to fraud--just two examples, plucked at random from today's headlines, of the ideological corruption that now seems to permeate American institutions.

The word I keep hearing in all these articles, the common thread that connects all these scandals, is "trust"--it seems that we no longer have enough it. People don't trust banks, banks don't trust each other, and neither trusts our political leaders or judicial system.

I'm not a sky-is-falling kind of guy; I tend to see history as the story of progress, and I have a great deal of faith in the creativity, decency, and resilience of human beings.

But the signs and portents are not good; it is now very likely that America is about to enter a full-blown crisis, one that will unfold on every level: spiritual, psychological, philosophical, financial, political, and military. Every institution will be affected, and so will every person.

Am I being melodramatic? I really don't think so. America could plausibly pull out of its nosedive, but at a certain point you have to admit, if only to yourself, that we are going to crash.

Journalists keep raising the specter of the Great Depression, but we're not going to see history repeat itself; America is a different place than it was in the 1930s or, for that matter, the 1960s, two previous crisis points. The next decade will be as different from those two decades as they were from each other.

In retrospect, both the 30s and the 60s were bridges; the Depression and New Deal completed the modernization of America, readying us for the role we occupied in the second half of that century; the 60s laid the foundation for the values we have needed in the twenty first century: diversity, tolerance, cosmopolitanism.

It's conceivable that the next decade will also be a bridge, though where it's going, I have no idea. At the moment, it seems that we are on the now-proverbial "bridge to nowhere," built by nihilists, but I don't want to believe that.

I can't; I'm a dad. For me, for all of us responsible for nurturing life, nihilism is not an option. "When I travel alone far from home, I think of my children's faces to calm myself down," writes Mary Pipher in her 1996 book The Shelter of Each Other. "Those faces are my mandalas. They comfort and secure me. The faces of those we love are the first, the primal, mandalas for us all."

Now I'm thinking of Liko's face, and of my wife's, faces I trust. They comfort me, but they also remind me to try to do the right thing, to be my best self, to try to be a hero, not a villain. We're walking on the bridge together. We all are, I think.

An afternoon in the library

1. I walk up to the book and pull it from the shelf. Moved by a strong intuition, I do something that I've never done before: I flip to the index looking for my name. There it is. I flip to page 248 and there I am, being quoted about robots. It seems like a message in a bottle, dropped into the water by a younger self who thought robots were more important than babies.

2. I walk upstairs and on the mezzanine all the chairs are filled by homeless people, each one surrounded by debris dragged in off the streets. One man snores softly to himself, the rest just sit, staring into space. In the past, I've always shrugged when foreigners asked me why there were so many homeless people in America: I don't know, I'd say. Now I think I know the answer: It's our isolation. It's not that they don't have jobs or homes; those are just symptoms. In fact, they are there on the mezzanine because they have no where else to go.

3. Crossing through the part of the library reserved as a study space for teenagers, I see two boys peering at a computer screen. As I get closer, I see they are leering at a photograph of a black woman in a thong and one of them whispers, "Cool." I imagine my son as one of those boys. I want to sit down and talk to them, somehow save them from the labyrinthine coldness of the screens, but instead I walk more quickly away.

Contemplating Disaster

As soon as I heard there had been an earthquake in central China, I emailed my dad, who on May 12 was in the ancient capital city of Xian. It's 400 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake in nearby Sichuan Province. They said the shock had been felt as far away as Beijing and Bangkok.

"It was a big one," he wrote back, "but we're ok." I was relieved.

In a follow-up email a day later, he shared a few more details. The buildings had swayed. Some tiles fell off the roofs of nearby buildings. All the shops had closed, and everyone came into the streets. Around the city, parents congregated outside the schools, all of which were still standing, to find their children.

Then, for the most part, life in Xian went on.

So, too, did life in Chicago. My family was intact, and my worries abated. I went upstairs, got Spot dressed, and went out to walk the dogs. The weather was beautiful, Spot enjoyed running around the playground and sitting on my lap as we went down the slide. He ate his favorite lunch of rice and tofu and complained loudly as I strapped him back into his stroller.

His life is very simple now, and because so much of my life is fit to meld with his, my life is simple, too. So it is, I imagine, for many parents everywhere, who can think of things and places and events beyond the horizon only briefly or occasionally, if at all, during the first years of their children's lives.

Yet images from the far corners of the world have the strange effect of penetrating the most distracted consciousness, of making the faraway seem next door, or of making someone else's life feel like my business; of making the moral violation of someone I've never met the source of my personal indignation, and the misfortune of others the source of my impotent frustration.


As the week progressed I learned more about the schools collapsing in Sichuan, one story after another, the numbers adding up and nowhere near the final tally, with hundreds and hundreds of children still inside. Then came the pictures, the few fortunate rescues, the many more grieving parents, and then still more parents facing the news that no parent wants to hear. I can't bring myself to post some of the pictures I've come across, of rescuers digging through the rubble of a school and coming across catacombs of children.

I can't shake these images. There have been plenty of natural disasters in my lifetime, most of them covered in the media, but not as heavily: earthquakes in Turkey and Iran, volcanic eruptions and mudslides in Central America, famines in Africa, floods around the world, many of these with higher final death tolls than what we are witnessing right now in Asia. Yet few of them kept me from sleeping at night.


But I was not the parent of a 16-month old boy then. The parent of an only child, like so many parents in China. Now, I am a father, and these images of the schools are nearly unbearable to behold. I just can't shake them.

At first I didn't dwell, as I have when I've worried about my own death, about the last minutes of these children's lives. Maybe the identification was there someplace, overwhelmed by the egoism that joined with my empathy for the parents, who sat by the rubble with their kid's backpacks full of fresh clothes, waiting for them to come home from school.

My ailing mother-in-law helped shake me out of that empathetic egoism last night. I held Spot up to the window after dinner, 10 floors above the lake, to watch the traffic and the waves. "Imagine," she said in her deteriorating English, "a child not much older than him, maybe one who can say a few words, like Mama come. But no one comes."

That feat of emotional imagination was something that I had never performed. It's so basic, I felt ashamed it hadn't come before. It took prompting from someone who has seen much more of life than I have. But it worked. And I have a feeling that once you've had a realization like that, it never leaves you.

Unfortunately, the experience of this new dimension of empathy doesn't make it easier to sleep at night. To the contrary. And it doesn't change anything in Sichuan Province.

One Dad's View on the Benefits of Staying Home

I liked this list, from the blog "Here Goes Everything," which I just added to our blog roll. This sounds like a guy who has taken some hits in his life, but is making the best of it and using his experiences to continue growing.

Inconceivable, Impossible.

Earlier this month, a first-time breast-cancer test for my wife found something abnormal. I've since discovered that this is increasingly common: As doctors screen earlier and the technology gets better, they are finding more and more little white spots on mammograms that lead to more testing.

We waited two very brittle weeks until the results came back: The conditions for cancer are present, but nothing is happening at the moment. She now needs to get tested every six months.

But from what I understand, the most likely outcome is that nothing at all will develop, and, even it something does, chances are high that treatment will be successful. I'm probably more likely to get hit by a car in the foreseeable future than she is to advance to the next stage.

Curiously, the main thing Olli wanted to talk about while we waited for results was whom I could find to serve as a mother to Liko and a companion to me. She paired me off with various single friends; she debated pros and cons of each match; she imagined elaborate scenarios.

This was her way of exerting control over the situation, or one aspect of it; she was creating simulacra to take care of us in her imagined absence. As you might guess, these flights of doom-laden fantasy made me seethingly uncomfortable, and yet I did find myself following her down these hypothetical paths.

For me, however, they didn't go anywhere. It is not hard to imagine Liko and me alone together; that feels as possible to me as moving to another city. But life without Olli seems inconceivable, impossible. I'm sitting in the dark typing this; it's 4:30 in the morning. I can't sleep. I don't want to.

Four Characters I Encountered (One in Absence) this Morning as I Dropped Liko off at School

The Barista: Had she been born in Russia in 1906, she would have become the muse of Constructivists and Bolshevik poster-artists. Slim and angular and dark, she never loses her knowing smile; you imagine her in vivid red and black on the walls of St. Petersburg and Moscow, beckoning the masses toward revolution. After the revolution, she would have been arrested, tried, and sent to Siberia, where she would have died of malnutrition and consumption. We'd see her name in biographies of Dziga Vertov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Instead, she was born in the 1980s in the United States and now she sits near the espresso machine, reading a battered copy of "Gravity's Rainbow." Both my wife and I have a crush on her, but we have no posters on which to put her.

The Wealthy, World-Famous Writer: He's my age, the bastard, and his son is the same age as my son and the boys go to the same preschool. I see him enter every morning holding his boy's hand, and his arrogant swagger seems to offer contrast to his little boy's lopsided gallop. He nods a cool greeting to me; there's a peculiar confidence in his eyes and he always sports a different T-shirt, usually advertising bands you've never heard of or hardware stores in places like Omaha. His life has unfolded as he has always imagined it would, a succession of book and movie deals, famous friends, ironic evenings. He knows the J-curve of his life will terminate one day, abruptly or on a downward slope, but that does not trouble him. He knows, better than most people, that everything must come to an end. His wealth and name will pass down his son, who will never have to struggle to survive. He imagines his son as an old man, dying without having accomplished anything. It is this prospect that keeps him up at night.

The Story-Telling Codger: He was at the coffee shop every morning and he always gave Liko dollar coins, and he told the stories of the different faces on the coins, repeating the same ones over and over, and each time Liko would listen as if hearing it all for the first time, eyes wide and staring at the coin, and I would make polite noises. "Put that in your piggy bank!" said the story-telling codger. "Save up for college!" After I dropped Liko off at school, I used the coins for bus money. A month ago, the story-telling codger stopped coming to the coffee shop. I asked after him. "He's sick," his friend, who once played violin in the Davis symphony, whispered to me. Then he raised his voice and said to Liko, "He's just resting. He'll be back." Liko nods and waits.

The Little Boy: In his room superheroes and robots come alive and in their melodramas the fate of the world is at stake, and his private world is destroyed and renewed, destroyed and renewed, and each time it is born a little bit larger than it was before. Outside on the street everything is alive and everything has something to say to him: the clouds and trees, the rain puddles and shadows, street signs and manhole covers, all of them whispering stories and shouting praise and muttering ridicule. As he enters school the walls glow and the doors vibrate and his teachers loom as large as giants. If all goes well and he survives and keeps growing, one day the clouds and streets will fall silent and his teachers will seem small and superheroes will not exist.

Birthday #1

About a year and a half ago, I took a long trip. It involved one of the world's lengthier voyages by air. When I returned a few weeks later, after a cramped period of imprisonment in a poorly-ventilated aluminum tube, full of annoying adolescents, a few suffering toddlers, and a missionary or two, I muttered to my traveling companion, as we collected our bags, that I never wanted to have children.

"Guess what?" asked my wife, as soon as we met outside customs, on a fine summer morning at O'Hare International Airport. "I'm pregnant."

A year and a half later, or about a week ago, we celebrated Spot's first birthday, in the depths of the Chicago winter. To mark the occasion, she baked a dozen cupcakes. My wife and I then ate them all, mostly while Spot was sleeping, which is still most of the time. Of course we offered him one, but as is the case with so many things in life, what we hoped he would want, and what he truly did want, did not quite match. He took an experimental bite for the camera, and then resumed his project of obsessively gnawing a ceramic egg purchased by his grandfather in Poland.

Looking back on that moment at the airport, one thing now seems clear. I was a fool. I probably still am. But now at least I know I was a fool to have muttered to my travel companion, as I did by the baggage carousel, that I never wanted to have children.

My companion on that trip happened to be my father. At one point, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, I asked him why anyone would want to have kids in the first place.

"Because," he answered with great philosophical wisdom, "it's fun."

I should make one thing clear. It's not foolish to want what I thought I wanted: to remain an unencumbered adult, childless. What was foolish was to think that I knew what I wanted at all. It's a realization that gets beyond the issue of parenthood and children, because it could apply to anything. We thought Spot might want a cupcake. Instead, he wanted a ceramic egg. My wife frequently reminds me that she had no intention of marrying someone like me, and I usually return the compliment. The point is that many decent and intelligent people can go for a long time believing that they have themselves, the world, and what they want, like, and dislike all figured out. Without having really experienced much of it.

And then things change. And there is no way they could possibly foresee what comes next.

I have to give my dad credit. It's something I do a lot now, since I'm at the stage in life where he's reaping interest on all the credit I denied him when I was 13. He was right. It is indeed fun to be Spot's dad. Spot cracks me up, and he can't even talk. I don't know why I never saw this possibility. For all these years I've been so wrapped up in my own recollections of childhood that I haven't troubled myself about what it must have been like to be a parent.

Well, now I know a little bit more. It's a lot of work, and a tremendous adjustment, but it's endlessly entertaining. It's also fun to be the husband of Spot's mom, and watch her be a mother; it's fun to be a family; to be friends with other families; a parent with friends who are not parents; to be the apprentices of empty-nesters and advisers to the newly-partnered; and to be the bearers of a priceless gift to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and to strangers at the play park. It's so much fun, in fact, that I can't imagine how I could possibly have come close to letting myself not go down this road.

It only now occurs to me that my father's reply on the airplane was a sort of compliment. He hadn't become my father because he was naturally appointed to be the highest authority on earth and the ultimate framework of the universe. He must have grown emotionally through parenthood, and enjoyed it. But I'm not sure if I would have understood it that way, if my wife hadn't had some news for me at the airport, news that a few months later sat up and looked at me, laughed, and forced me to change the way I think about myself, the way I must have done to a different set of parents 38 years before.

Remember the Future

Happy New Year!

Or is it?

For decades, the conventional wisdom has said that we're getting dumber, society is disintegrating, and the world is becoming more dangerous. Each new year, it seems, has carried us one step closer to the abyss. Why would anyone want to have children?

There's just one problem with this feeling: It's totally contradicted by the evidence.

Are we getting dumber? Not according to IQ tests, which show each new generation of Americans being smarter than the previous one. But isn't our culture dumbed down by TV? Not really. Have you ever sat down and looked at the pop culture of previous eras? I have. It's filled with racist and sexist stereotypes, cruel jokes, simplistic morality, and banal ideas. Even TV has improved dramatically. Compare shows like The Sopranos to the best TV dramas of the 50s, 60s, and 70s--The Sopranos beats them all in psychological, moral, and artistic sophistication. And The Sopranos isn't alone--the best TV these days is really, really good, and reflects a wiser, more self-aware culture.

Is society disintegrating? To be sure, there is less social capital in the United States today than there was fifty years ago. People are spending less time together; politics is polarized. But are things really worse than they were, say, in the decades leading up to the Civil War? Are people angrier now than they they were the 1930s or more polarized than in the 1960s? The answer is no. America today is more egalitarian, more tolerant, and more diverse than in any previous era.

Is the world more dangerous? Recently, crime in America has declined; so has domestic violence. Infant mortality is down; people are living longer. Scientists like Stephen Pinker, Douglas Fry, and Robert M. Sapolsky have argued that communal, political violence has gone down over the past few centuries--way down. Writes Pinker:

Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

Of course, there's plenty to feel anxious about in 2008. Expenses and debt are up; inequality is growing. The nightmare occupation of Iraq continues. The globe is warming. Those are things to struggle against, personally and politically--and we might lose. But you know what? People in the past fought to make life better for us today--and many of their efforts succeeded. We have an obligation to the do the same for future generations.

That's my New Year's resolution: Remember the future.

[Cross-posted with the Greater Good blog.]

The Walk

Liko and Shelly are both ill and they both go to bed early. I tuck them in, do the dishes, pick up his room.

Now what? It's only 8:45 and I'm not tired. I pull on my coat, grab a book, and walk out the door and down Castro to 24th. I walk into The Dubliner and order a Guinness.

Thirty minutes later Amanda strolls in with a gaggle of friends.

"Hey," she says. "What are you doing here?"

I tell her the situation. "And you just went out for a beer?" she says.

"Yep."

"That so cute!"

Cute?!

Amanda is with the other mothers in her coop preschool. They gather in the back, sipping beers, excited to be out at night.

"I love the coop right now," Amanda says, glancing over.

"That's great," I say.

She goes to join the moms.

I finish my second Guinness, leave The Dubliner and walk back up 24th. I see my friend Joey in the window of the restaurant where he works as a bartender, putting chairs on tables, wiping down the bar. He doesn't see me outside; watching him, I realize that I've known him now for seven years. Seven years. His wife is about to have their second baby.

I remember teaching Liko to walk on 24th. I'd give him his little cart and make him push it towards me, and then one day I took the cart away. Passerby would gape at Liko toddling down the sidewalk, his wide-open smile promising all of us that there is always something better. It hits me that those days are gone and they're never coming back.

Now I'm turning up Castro: up, up, up, I don't even notice the climb. My hill. There's my house: the blue and yellow Victorian, our landlords below, us above; our lights are on in the gable. I think about Roxie, how she hooked me up with my publisher, and I feel grateful to her.

All these people who have helped me in life: Why do we help each other? None of us can make it without help. I unlock the door and go inside.

We won't last too much longer in this house; it gets smaller every day, and San Francisco seems to get more expensive. I turn on the laptop and start writing this. My fingers feel thick as I type, but I have to get this trivia down, before it goes away.

More kids vs. religion

Former Daddy Dialectic blogger Chip (who is now retired from blogging, alas) wrote a number of posts on raising kids without religion--posts that, not surprisingly, provoked quite a lot of discussion.

Though I am every bit as atheistic and philosophically materialist as Chip, I often disagreed with him about the need for secular social structures that can connect people to something larger than themselves and reinforce moral behavior.

A new study published in the journal Psychological Science finds that thoughts about God do indeed encourage people to share what they have. But researchers also discovered that secular concepts of civic responsibility and social justice do just about as much to promote altruism.

In two related experiments, University of British Columbia Associate Professor Ara Norenzayan and Ph.D. graduate student Azim Shariff divided 125 participants into three groups.

In the first group, researchers asked participants to unscramble sentences that contained words like spirit, God, and sacred. The second group played the same word game, but with non-religious content. The third played the game with words like court, civic, jury, and police—thereby priming them with thoughts of secular moral authority.

Then each participant was given 10 one-dollar coins and asked to make a decision about how much keep for herself and how much to share with another person--this is a standard laboratory test for altruism called the Dictator's Game.

The results: The religious group offered to share an average of $4.56 with another person, the secular group shared $4.44—and people who were not primed with any moral thoughts at all shared only $2.56.

Researcher Azim Shariff told me that their experiment shows how important it is for people to be reminded of their social responsibilities, but stresses that faith in God is optional. “We added the secular institutions as an afterthought in the second study, mostly because we wanted to demonstrate that religion wasn’t the only thing that could do this," Shariff said. "In our history, we’ve developed a lot of cultural institutions designed to reign in our selfish behavior. One of the earliest and most effective ones, we believe, was religion. But that’s certainly at this point not the only thing that does it.”

Not only did secular thoughts do almost as good a job at priming altruistic behavior as God thoughts, but people who described themselves as religious did not behave more altruistically than godless counterparts--a finding that a lot of other studies have echoed. (In one study that had different groups of Princeton seminary students walk by a man slumped and groaning on the sidewalk, researchers discovered that their willingness to help depended on one variable: how late they were for their next appointment.)

“Our study adds to a growing body of evidence to suggest that there has been all these cultural institutions that have evolved either purposely or through some blind process of cultural selection that serve to reign in our selfishness so that we can live in larger social groups harmoniously," said Shariff. "We evolved to live in much smaller groups, with more limited range of prosocial behavior, but we’ve developed rituals, beliefs, practices that allow us to overcome our more base natures and cooperate more, which has allowed us to build civilization.”

So can we raise moral children outside of structures of supernatural belief? I believe the answer is yes, and there is evidence to support my belief. But I don't think individual parents can do it alone--and there's evidence to support that contention as well. To curb selfish behavior and cultivate meaning in our lives, we need to be constantly reminded of our interdependence with other people and the natural world. So do atheists need a church? I'd say they do.

Going Crazy

If we were to grab a coffee together, you probably wouldn't guess that I'm going crazy. You might not even suspect that you're the first person I've spoken with in, say, 24 hours, discounting purely functional exchanges with my wife as she heads out the door in the morning. I might look a little tired, a little dark under the eyes, and if I played my cards right my garbled mental functioning might come across as laid-back and mellow. Sitting back in my cafe chair, legs crossed, I would be ravenously pirating your social energy without you even knowing it.

But all told, you would be deceived. Because at that moment, I might indeed be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Married, yes, but lately coexisting in the same household, two flywheels of different diameters rotating past each other at different rates. And little Spot: is he the cause, or the cure of it all? Or perhaps both? He certainly is the focus of a new dispensation, one that alters perception in such a way as to make the days blur, to give me deeper happiness than I've known since my own childhood, to make me lie awake in the small hours of the morning wondering about our future relationship as Father and Son, about how old I'll be when he graduates college, what we'll do if my wife looses her job, what I've made of my life now that it's nearly half over, when the next war will come. That sort of thing.

Which is enough to make anyone lose some sleep and feel slightly batty. My own ethnographic "participant-observer" stint as an at-home parent helps me understand the supposed craze for Valium in the mythical hey-day of the bored 50s housewife, to say nothing of the pent-up and aching Victorian bourgeois woman chronicled so well by E. M. Forster. What energies and impulses are building in me that I am unaware of? For a few hours of the day, usually in the morning, I wheel the Spot through parks and down sidewalks, chatting to a few neighbors and savoring the sense of expansion in this limited time beyond the walls of our home.

Soon enough, it's back inside, and for Spot back to bed, which means I can't go far. I have plenty of work to do, but feeling slightly batty isn't always a productivity-booster. What will my son think, when he's old enough to ask me what I do? "Daddy," I can imagine him asking, "why don't you leave during the day like Johnny's dad?"

"Well, I do leave once in a while to teach, research in the libraries, and a lot of the time I'm in my home office working. But my primary job is to take care of the things at home, and to take care of you. Which means I can take you hiking or out for a sail-boat ride in the middle of the afternoon. And chances are, we'll have time to go to the beach more often in the summer."

My wife isn't worried at all about that. In fact, she's certain that Spot will have far more trouble understanding what mommy does all day and why she has to go away to do it: the sitting-in-a-cubicle-staring-at-a -computer-sending-emails-making-phone-calls-yet-earning
-all-sorts-of -cash world of knowledge-based office employment. What I do is much simpler.

My deeper worry, though, is battling my own isolation. It ebbs and flows. Sometimes it's a matter of my own fatigue, of putting off for another day what seems like the chore of making phone calls to friends, catching up, arranging a get-together, making sure I keep up my existing guy-relationships in a world that seems to have been suddenly emptied of other men, and getting up the energy to build new relationships in the fields of female energy. Sometimes it's easier to retreat, let Spot take a nap, and catch up on my reading.

But ultimately, for him, that's not ideal. The more I'm out in the world, the more he gets to see of it, and any advance knowledge is a leg up. Just today, I built in some time to take him to the play-park mid-way between our home and his grandparents. Less than a mile from the University, shaded from the semi-tropical sunshine by tall maples and poplar, this particular jungle-gym and set of benches is populated with the mothers, grandparents, and children of Chinese graduate students conversing as if in Beijing, interspersed with various moms speaking Italian, German, Spanish, and all loosely tied together by the English lingua franca. And Spot in the middle of it all.

Two little boys, about 5 and 6 years old, saw that there was a new baby around and immediately came up to offer him their toys. My father-in-law held Spot up to take one, and the little boys laughed when he did. I had to pause to take in what just happened. I'm not the only one willing to help take care of Spot -- even these little boys, in a touching gesture, were offering to do their part. It seemed like they were waiting for him. That's his future, I just needed to bring him to it. These are just a few of the welcoming arms Spot has encountered. Part of my job is to do the work of building relationships that will let Spot find more of them. In the process, hopefully, I can also keep from going batty.

The Zen of Strolling

The Spot is my zen master. He does it all while wrapped up like a monk in his sedan chair -- I mean stroller -- while being pushed around the neighborhood, an ageless child-sage. My wife and I have wondered if he might be on the short list for a shot at incarnating the Dali Lama, though his timing is a little off. Why not? The rabbis will tell you that both your child and mine knew the Torah by heart until forgetting it all at birth. That's a lot of reading, so surely a little spiritual virtuosity is not impossible?

Every day, for about an hour or so, we pick a circuit in the neighborhood and head out. Occasionally I bump into my friend Steve down the block, and we caravan for a few blocks before parting ways. That's about as social as strolling gets -- with a few exceptions -- and that's fine with me. We swing wide of the play parks and their fountains like freight traffic getting shunted off onto a business beltway. We'll be in the play parks soon enough. For now, I need my stroller zen.

The Spot more or less goes along. He could just as happily be on his activity mat, yanking on multi-colored giraffe legs or trying to eat the blue monkey. Instead, being the mensch that he is, he lets me get out of the house, and doesn't object when I occasionally call a halt to our perambulation before a passing but sublime moment of urban beauty.

It's hard to find the peace of mind that this brings while sitting in my living room. Strolling with Spot forces me to inhabit the world of the concrete, consisting primarily of the sidewalk in front of us. We judge the size of cracks in the pavement. We gage the slope of the street. We keep an eye on the thunderheads above. With every change in direction, I readjust the awning and carriage to protect Spot from the sun. We dodge sprinklers. If we get caught in a shower, I batten him down. When it's windy, I listen to him laugh while the awning brushes his face.

It's these everyday details of strolling that get me out of my head. And this is where the zen comes in: absorption in the immediate leads to the transcendent. In a way that would be impossible in a car, attention to the simple details of slow travel opens my mind to the occasionally edifying things around us. We could be hiking in Yosemite, or canoeing in Ontario. We just happen to be strolling in Chicago.

In June we strolled through clouds of cottonwood seed, blowing through the neighborhood like a summer snow, collecting against the curbs in small drifts. Out by the Lake we saw the waves roll in on a dry, northerly Canadian breeze. Later, we saw the water lie flat under a soggy dome of Gulf air. On the right block at the right time, the city can feel deserted, the wind in the canopy of oaks above is audible. A flock of green parakeets bobs down the street and flies up through an opening in the trees, and I notice that the sound of internal combustion has, for the moment, disappeared.

I can't imagine taking care of the Spot someplace where it was difficult or unpleasant to do our daily stroll. I know such places exist. They tend to be suburban or exurban areas with no sidewalks and 8-lane roads, or pockets of urban, gang-ridden social pathology. Small towns are perfect for strolling, as are dense urban neighborhoods. Either way, all you really need are halfway decent sidewalks, and some trees for cover against the summer sun and winter winds. Plus a good zen master to help you see things again, but for the first time.

Poem after a summer morning stroll with my son

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

--Dylan Thomas, "Poem in October"

So it goes

I rolled out of bed at 5:30, the baby and Shelly still sleeping. I pulled on some clothes and went out the door in search of coffee. Walking down 24th St., hunched over, hands in pockets, I glanced at a newspaper box and saw a headline that stopped me cold: "Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84."

Until I was roughly 12 or 13 years old, I was a voracious reader but I read only comic books, trashy spy thrillers, and bad science fiction. I don't remember why I plucked Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five from the shelf of my school library (a book that conservative moralists have repeatedly fought to ban from library shelves). I was probably drawn to the science fictional premises -- time travel! aliens! -- and I vividly remember how absorbed I was by the end of the first chapter. Slaughterhouse Five, which depicts the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, was my first true introduction to literature, and it served as a gateway to deeper reading.

Why did that strange novel grab me? When I flip through my junior high yearbook, I see bleak, snowy Michigan fields, girls with feathered hair, boys in "Members Only" jackets, and pictures of teachers who seemed ancient at the time, but were probably much younger than I am today. I was a sad, confused kid, but not having a language or avenue to express my feelings, I drove the sadness and confusion underground. I felt sorry for my parents, my classmates, my teachers, my town, and myself, because we all seemed to be locked into schedules, obligations, and values that we did not create and did not want.

During the next year, I read all of Vonnegut's novels and short-story collections that had been published up until that point. I did not understand most of what I read (and today I still get something new out of Vonnegut, every time I re-read one of his stories), but I knew that he seemed to perfectly capture the world I saw around me, giving voice to feelings that I didn't have the words or maturity to express. I see now that sometimes his sadness shaded over into pure depression and that there is a very fine line between his universal pity, which caused him to prescribe kindness as the best basis of human relations, and his own private self-pity, which derailed his more autobiographical work and seemed to cut him off from his readers.

Was it healthy for so young a kid to be exposed to Vonnegut's experience with war, death, and depression? In 1988, the psychologists N. T. Termine and C. E. Izard studied the effect of mothers' sadness on their infants. They found that expressions of sorrow through face and voice slowed the exploratory play of the babies; additional studies show that sadness slows cognitive processes and enables deliberate scrutiny of self and situations. Though we might see happiness as the apotheosis of human existence, sadness has its place in helping us to slow down and reflect upon our experience. Whether we want to or not, we teach our children to be sad, and it's a good thing, too. Vonnegut (and others, of course) taught me how that sadness is something to cultivate alongside happiness. Both help us to get through our days.

Slaughterhouse Five also gave me my first glimpse at the real-world consequences of war and violence, something that American media and popular culture conceal from us. I gradually turned away from books, movies, and TV that portrayed killing as easy for the killers, war as a glorious endeavour, and aggression as a desirable trait. "God damn it," writes Vonnegut in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, "you've got to be kind."

I haven't always lived up to that advice, but I've tried. Thanks, Kurt, for the books.

Flow vs. Its Opposite

Over at the Greater Good blog (my esteemed employer!), Christine Carter McLaughlin & Kelly Corrigan talk about "flow" and what makes their daughters happy, as part of a series of dialogues on the roots of childhood happiness. To define flow, Christine quotes psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

[A] person in flow is completely focused...Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification.

I've experienced the state Csikszentmihalyi describes, sometimes for long periods at a time, but when I hit my thirties it happened less and less often--and now that I'm a dad, it's very rare indeed. The irony is that my son Liko seems to spend ninety percent of his life in flow, broken by spasms of inconsolable rage and weepiness. It's as though on his birth my happiness jumped out of me and landed square in his little body, leaving me with only a bit of residue; I can smell it, like resin in a pipe, but there ain't enough to smoke...

I don't write this as an invitation for you to feel sorry for me; it's an empirical fact that most parents of young children feel as I do: self-conscious, enfeebled, unchallenged, displaced. Precisely the opposite of the state Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. "Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives," writes psychologist Daniel Gilbert, "becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away."

Yet most of us, Gilbert notes, will say that our children make us happy--indeed, if you inquired as to my happiness, I would reply that I am, in fact, happy, and that Liko is the poopy, giggling fount of my happiness.

But it's a melancholy, distrait kind of happiness. Yesterday I took him to the merry-go-round. He rode around and around on his horse, up and down, flowing in every sense of the word. I watched his face and I was happy, but it was happiness tinged by a combination of fatigue (I'd been chasing him all day), anxiety (thinking about a looming deadline), and something else that's hard to describe--a feeling of fragility, like this moment couldn't last? More to the point, I was preoccupied with making sure that he didn't fall off the damn horse and break his arm. A moment's inattention, and Liko could be hurt, or worse. It's normal: people who care for little kids are often wracked with moment-to-moment nervousness, and every day we find another gray hair on our heads.

I can feel the reader, especially older parents, rushing to reassure me: it's OK, relax, don't take everything so seriously, get over yourself. It's our American impulse: we don't like to see anyone unhappy, we can't let them just be sad or angry. I share the hypothetical reader's impulse. As we were riding the bus home, Liko asleep in my lap, I looked at the people around me and most of them wore woebegone looks. I wanted them to be happy, for my sake as well as Liko's; who doesn't like to see people smile? It's a noble impulse, but there's also something stupid about it.

Gilbert sets forth three reasons why we insist, against all evidence, that our kids make us happy: 1) kids are, like fine wine or expensive cars, so costly that we actually rationalize their costs and conclude that something so demanding must make us happy; 2) "Memories are dominated by their most powerful--and not their most typical--instances," so that a single "I love you" can wipe out years of sleep deprivation; and 3) "When you have one joy, it's bound to be the greatest"--meaning, because children occlude other sources of pre-child pleasure, such as movies and sex, we demand that our kids give us some degree of happiness, dammit.

This list will doubtless horrify childfree people, and serve as a form of birth control. I think, however, that Gilbert's misses one big one reason why we have children: kids are, to borrow from Chris Hedges, a force that gives us meaning. They structure our lives, create comradeship and community with other parents, and drive us out of bed and into an world of responsibility and interdependence, where, in many ways, our will is not our own. We lose agency and freedom. We gain purpose and wherewithal. The meaning might be illusory, but the brute biology of the situation, and the intrinsic vulnerability of young kids, gives the illusion a massiveness that pushes smaller, weaker illusions aside.

"Our children give us many things," Gilbert writes, "but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that fact, we should celebrate it. Our ability to love beyond all measure those who try our patience and weary our bones is at once our most noble and most human quality."

Just so. Here's my point: for adults, happiness is overrated. I'm aware that this opinion puts me in the company of Calvinists and drill sergeants, but I'd pick them over the happiness enforcers any day of the week. Happiness, in my view, is something that happens on the way to something else: not "a skill we can learn," as a colleague once put it, but an evolutionary accident whose pursuit can corrupt us, if we mistake it for an end in itself. "Flow"--that state when "living becomes its own justification"--may well be a kind of happiness unique to childhood, which we shed as we age. Perhaps I am not as able to "go with the flow" as I was when I was younger, but perhaps that is a necessary step towards a deeper kind of happiness.

Kids vs. religion

By Chip -- Do kids need religion?

No.

It really isn't necessary or possible to force children to believe in "god," in either a general or particular way. Moreover, morality, ethics, and being a good person don't depend on religion or belief in god.

I myself was raised in a religious family. I went to church every Sunday from birth until I left home to go to college. I went to a religious elementary school, and went to religious education classes when I was in public middle and high school. I took courses in theology as an undergraduate at a religiously-based university.

But I never felt like I actually believed that any of the stories I was told were literally true. I could see that they were parables and lessons, that they were stories that made philosophical, ethical, and moral points -- not all of which were very moral or ethical (for example the numerous genocides commanded by the Yahweh).

As for the theology, I never actually believed that there is a "god" somewhere out there micromanaging or even watching over humanity, much less having "personal relationships" with individual humans.

But then came kids. My wife was raised in a different Christian faith tradition, but she feels much the same way as I do about religion. We talked a lot about what to do. We ended up having both kids baptized at the church I was raised in -- largely for the sake of my parents and grandparents. And it gave us an excuse to have the extended family get together.

When my daughter reached kindergarten age, we began going to church, and she went to Sunday school, as did my son when he reached that age. My daughter made her first penance and first communion. I think that we both felt it would be good to do this, despite our own non-belief.

But I found this position increasingly untenable. I didn't believe, I had never believed, yet I was asking my kids to go through the motions.

We tried other churches, but we didn't feel comfortable in them either, mainly because they were so religious and were talking about god all the time (of course, what did we expect?).

So we decided that it was best to be honest with ourselves and with our kids. We stopped going to church, and stopped trying to get our kids to go through the motions.

They had early on proclaimed their atheism -- I'd had to ask them not to argue with the Sunday school teachers about this -- which was one of the issues that led us to this decision.

Unfortunately, in this society, I need to add this: My kids are moral and ethical, they have very strong senses of right and wrong, and though they are not perfect, they are great kids and will be wonderful adults.

(Of course, the very fact that I feel like I have to say this indicates how our society views nonbelievers. If I was religious and a believer, I wouldn't even have to tell you about my kids' morality and ethics...)

Morality and ethics do not come out of religion. We all know people who are immoral and unethical who were also believers. And there are plenty of nonbelievers who are moral and ethical.

The sense of ethics, the belief that there are right and wrong ways to treat other people, comes, I believe, from how we see our parents and significant others act as we are growing up. Adults model behavior to kids, regardless of religious belief. As they grow up, children absorb the values of the people raising them. Kids learn by being told, and talked to, and having things explained to them: Why some things are right, and why some things are wrong; why some people do bad things; why others are selfless.

Kids also learn by watching what their parents and care givers do, how they act, how they live their lives, apart from the words.

But I also believe that there is an innate sense of morality and ethics. I know plenty of people whose parents were awful, yet who themselves turned out to be great people.

To me that indicates that there is some level of morality that is part of the package of being human. Perhaps these people also were lucky enough to have other adults in their lives who reinforced their inner moral senses.

Given this, I believe that morality and ethics don't come from believing in god, or from being attached to a particular religious community. Those values come from within, and they are reinforced by the way adults explain what's right and wrong, and how those adults themselves behave.

When I was talking to my 15-year old daughter CB about this, she said she thinks that nonbelievers are actually more moral: they do the right thing not because of a fear of punishment in the afterlife, but just because it's the right thing to do. I wouldn't say that all believers do the right thing only out of fear; but for those who do, I think CB's reasoning is right on target.

That said, I do believe it is important for my kids to be familiar with the various religious mythologies that are part of our cultural heritage. My kids know the Bible stories, are familiar with the Jesus stories, the saints and other aspects of Christian religious belief. They are also familiar with other religious traditions, as well as the basics of the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome.

I see this knowledge as important for purely cultural reasons. You cannot understand a large part of European literature and art if you don't know the background stories coming out of Christianity and Judaism. You cannot understand the politics of large parts of the US if you don't have some basic knowledge of Christianity.

But kids don't have to believe that the stories of Christianity are actually true, any more than they need to believe the ancient Roman or Greek myths.

Of course we're lucky to live in a community that is pretty progressive, which is not dominated by Christian fundamentalism, and in which my kids know other kids who are also not believers. But given the outright hostility to atheists in US society, I have also had to warn my kids to be careful, to not discuss their beliefs with people unless they know them.

While I have no problem with other people believing whatever they want to believe -- as long as they don't try to force it on me -- I also think it's important to recognize that kids don't need to have a belief in god, anymore than they need to believe in santa claus or the easter bunny. They need to have parents who instill in them their values, a sense of responsibility and empathy towards other human beings, and who walk the walk as well as they talk the talk.

So if you're feeling uncomfortable raising your kids in an atmosphere of religious belief, act on your own beliefs and instincts. Kids are just fine without god or religion.

Crossposted at daddychip2

How the Sun Rose

Early morning. Liko goes to the window and sees the light spilling over Mt. Diablo.

"What are you doing, Liko?"

"The sun. I want to hold it."

"What will you do with the sun?"

"Put it in the sky."