How Should We Think About This (eBook)

chapter 1

a penny for your thoughts

It was sunny but cold in Denver that December afternoon of 1997 when I was driving home with my friend after attending a Denver Broncos football game at Mile High Stadium. It had been an exciting game. The Broncos had won and were on their way to becoming the next Super Bowl Champions.

We had just left the stadium and en route to my house in the suburbs when I got a call from my twenty-one-year-old daughter who was at home with her younger sisters, my wife, and my wife’s friend. My daughter sounded panicked when she said, “Something’s wrong with mom.” She told me I should go straight to the emergency room to see her.

At the hospital I found my wife Rose in one of the ER cubicles, looking very scared. She said that she had trouble that morning buttoning her shirt and brushing her teeth, that her right hand felt somewhat paralyzed. When her symptoms continued as the day progressed, her friend drove her to the ER.

After a brief exam, the doctors did a brain scan. They told us they found a small mass. It was either a small stroke or tumor.

The doctors waited a few weeks before doing another scan to see whether changes to the mass occurred. That would help them diagnose what was going on. After a second scan done later in January of 1998, a very serious, no nonsense brain surgeon informed us that surgery was imminent. A few days later, they operated on Rose. After surgery the doctor ushered me and my wife’s sister into a small private room to tell us that he had found a glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of cancer that begins within the brain.

In a compassionate and yet straight-forward way, he got right to the point—my wife had about a year to live. She was fifty-one years old. We had been together for twenty-six years. She had always been in perfect health.

I remember that I had trouble processing what he said. It was so alien to my assumptions about how that day would unfold and about my future with Rose, that it simply made no sense. My first reaction was I must have heard him wrong. I looked at my wife’s sister sitting next to me in that small room, and her expression reflected the same shock that I was feeling. The room was very quiet as the surgeon let his terrible discovery sink in.

As we began to ask the surgeon the obvious questions like, are you sure, attempting to shape his message into something more bearable, my thoughts went to my four daughters waiting at home for the results. How am I going to tell them that their mother is dying?

As it turned out, 1998 proved far more challenging than I could have ever imagined. In May, five months after my wife Rose’s initial surgery, I was sitting on my bed at home one day with her and my daughters, when my dad phoned to tell me that my big sister, my kids’ beautiful, high-spirited, and glamorous Auntie Nusza had just died in a car accident. Three months later, in August, I called my best friend Dave, who had been my college roommate and the godfather of one of my daughters. He was also dealing with cancer. His son answered the phone and told me that about an hour before I called, my great friend had passed away peacefully at home. Three months after that on November 30th, my wife Rose took her last breath as I held her hand and her family surrounded her. 1998.

One particular moment earlier that year stands out in my memory. I was at home sitting on my couch, my legs outstretched on the cushions, with Rose sitting between my legs leaning back against my chest. We were watching something on TV, enjoying being close when she sat up and turned toward me. She looked at me for a long moment before she said, her voice cracking, “How should we think about this?”

It was clear that she wasn’t talking about what was on TV or what the forecast for the weather was. She was talking about what sort of thinking might be useful amid the reality of living and dying—her living and her dying. She was looking for a way to create thinking that would have her and us staying engaged in ways as satisfying as possible during the unknowable.

I’m not sure that I can think of a bigger, more profound question, especially coming as it did from my partner, my best friend, my lover, my confidant, the mother of my children, and especially coming at that moment in time. My response was to feel both the terror and richness of connecting with my wife at that level of vulnerability—at that level of authenticity—at that level of reality. What could I possibly say?

In retrospect, what is amazing to me was her presence and clarity. But that was very typical of Rose. No matter where she found herself, she always made the best of any situation—always looking for a useful and ultimately satisfying way to think about things.

Rose believed that we naturally create our various experiences, each one fitting together in its own way. She understood that our countless unique experiences are not connected to each other in a logical way, but rather are fundamentally linked only in the sense that they grow out of what energetically resonates with us, what calls out to us in the reality of a moment. In other words, she believed that we could have a fulfilling experience sitting on that couch together regardless of any conclusions about the state of her health, and that’s what her question was all about.

Rose’s question to me simply reflected how she approached life’s challenges and possibilities whether associated with living and dying, or winning and losing, or getting a new job, or losing weight, or dealing with an argument. She approached every day with the belief that there was always a naturally fulfilling way forward whether it fit with the logical implications of a current situation or not. She believed that the creation of fulfilling experiences is a naturally inherent quality of being aware—and dire conclusions and predictions about a particular experience—in this case her illness—didn’t change that. It was in this brave way that she asked, “How should we think about this?”

Rose intuitively wanted to avoid what I call the trap of logical thinking. The trap is the belief that discovering facts and abiding by their logical implications is fundamentally how we know what to do. In other words, having a fulfilling experience is dependent upon thinking as our guide, and therefore the more factually and logically accurate that thinking is, the more effectively we can guide our experiences. That means that if I learn the right things, I will be able to control my life so that I am happy. It also means that when I’m not happy, it’s because I am lacking in some knowledge or ability to make things right—in some way I am deficient and need to be fixed.

One offshoot of the trap is the fundamental conclusion that our unique experiences are all connected in a logical way. Therefore, something defined as factually true in one experience will also be true across all our experiences and act as a necessary guide in making them effective.

For example, if I conclude that it is true that I felt great after winning a tennis tournament but felt dissatisfied when I lost, then I might also logically conclude that to feel good about myself I must win every time. The idea of winning becomes an essential guide in managing my satisfaction. If I believe that all my experiences are logically connected, then I would conclude that winning in all my various experiences is essential if I am to feel satisfied.

But what happens if I win at something but don’t feel great? Suppose that I was playing tennis with my nine-year-old grandson—does that fact about winning still hold true? Will I feel great if I beat him in every volley? Or is this experience best guided in a different way, a way not dependent on winning or losing?

Rose intuitively knew that her thinking and resulting knowledge—rather than being her guide—itself needed guidance or it would fall into that logical trap. In asking, how should we think about this, she implied that the how she was looking for lay outside of thinking altogether, outside of thoughts about her having terminal cancer.

The trap of logical thinking could have robbed her and us of precious opportunities for satisfying experiences together—incredibly precious moments that we did get to share repeatedly during those challenging months in 1998 just as we had over our many years together. Fortunately, we didn’t try to tie all our experiences together in a logical way.

I think of her question—How should we think about this? —as one of the most courageous and potentially rewarding questions a person can ask in just about any situation. Why? Because it naturally puts our thinking in a larger context than its own self-referencing, meager ideas, and conclusions—the larger context of naturally evolving experiences that transcend the limitations we logically impose on ourselves and our awareness.

I refer to those ideas or thinking as meager because without that context, ideas lack the transformative quality of what being alive and aware actually is—the transformative quality of resonance in creating naturally satisfying and fulfilling experiences.

That larger context allows us to have uncountable unique personal experiences that are connected energetically rather than logically, which is to say fully. And the energetic connection that ties those experiences together, that guides them, is the context of resonance—what energetically resonates, feeling like it...