SURVIVING DIVORCE

I learned to run in my mid-40s, at the urging of my tennis partner. Besides being my initiation into the life-changing experience of becoming an age group athlete, it proved life-saving as well. Through the period of my divorce in 1982 I increased my running to deal with feelings of despair.  Eventually I suffered a stress injury. I also I discovered that you can’t cry and run at the same time.

It was while rehabbing the injury, during the summer of 1983, that learned about a still-new sport. In July of that year I raced in my first triathlon. 

My oldest son surprised me by arriving that morning at the race venue. In the photo he took at mile 3 on the run I look like I might not survive the event. Many years later my mother was watching me race Ironman California, but left halfway through the marathon, saying to Jane, “I just can’t watch any more of this suffering.” And that was the race in which I won my age group!

Age groups are five-year periods: I started out in 45-49. By the time I entered 50-54—the exciting experience of “aging up,” in which you become among the youngest competitors—I had become competitive enough to imagine qualifying for Ironman.

Competition fostered confidence to address what I thought were my limitations. It’s irresistibly tempting in a crisis to cast yourself as a victim. So I had begun by telling friends, women in couples we’d known for years, that my wife had left. I stopped after the first two gave me essentially the same reply: “Good for her. I wish I’d done it years ago.”

So, in the crisis created by the end of my marriage, I began rethinking my life. I realized that we are not born with a self. 

We each have a number of stable traits, but we assemble a self from features and details in the lives around us. Many of these elements are inconsistent with one another, partly because the process is unconscious and partly because human behavior—like speech—is inherently ambiguous. 

The job of constructing a self—my picture of who I am—takes around 20 years, which is why we all find, no matter how long we live, that the years of college and after remain the most vivid of our lives.

My point, however, is that all the formative decisions, like marriage, are fit into that picture I’ve drawn; it becomes a template. Not only that: it serves as a model. Indeed, we both live out the picture and exempify it in unintentional ways.

It’s this unintentional teaching Philip Larkin satirizes in his poem This Be the Verse:

They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad.

They don’t mean to, but they do.

They give you all the faults they had,

Then add some extra just for you…

Man hands on misery to man.

It builds up like a coastal shelf.

So get out as quickly as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

CREATING A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP

I was out raking my yard one day in May 1984. By this time my divorce was old news, and I’d been away that year teaching in London. I looked up at the approach of a friend and colleague walking home from the university. He stopped and said, “Hi John. Want to meet a woman?” “Sure,” I said.

So I went to his house on the weekend of Mother’s Day and was introduced to Jane. Walking up the drive I’d noticed a bumper sticker on her car for a congressional candidate in Georgia. Well, I thought, we’re politically compatible anyway. 

She herself had more than political appeal, with a brilliant smile and a PhD in counseling psychology from University of Georgia. These were only enhanced by my discovery, playing singles tennis on our first date, that she had a killer forehand.

Having both of us learned already that marriage causes divorce, we agreed never to repeat that mistake. We still celebrate that weekend in May as our anniversary.

It was when we decided to move in together that we began the work of establishing a partnership. We’ve since written the book on healthy relationships: Loving Well [available on Amazon].

Among our discoveries: we choose partners for qualities that we ourselves lack; but there’s an impulse to moralize differences; such moralizing interferes with affection; and loss of affection destroys intimacy.

“Moralizing” happens when I describe others’ behavior as “bad” or “wrong.” One of the things Jane found attractive in me is that my sense of time is quite elastic: I’m not inclined to be punctual, in sharp contrast to her preference always to be at least 15 minutes early. I score well to the left on the Myers-Briggs “P” scale.

But what begins as charming flexibility is likely later to be labeled “careless,” “insensitive,” or “never on time.” Resentment builds. Affection is lost. Children, of course, are acutely aware of these qualities in their parents and in their lives.

Reversing the consequences of moralizing is not easy, but the method is a simple one. Certainly, as Jane once observed, the simplest things are often the most difficult, Yet few things more worthwhile than restoring affection and increasing intimacy.

EXERCISE, EATING, & COMPETITION

When I taught triathlon training, I used to show my students a gel—a 1oz. foil packet containing 100cal of carbohydrate—to illustrate one of the ways you can provide for your nutrition during prolonged exercise. I ate a lot of these in the course of endurance races like Ironman, which take anywhere from eight to sixteen hours. At that level of effort you use up around 400-600 calories per hour, in addition to fluids and electrolytes.

So learning to eat is both an important technique and part of the fun of endurance racing. You can’t finish an Ironman until you learn to manage your nutrition.

But there’s an ingredient in this task that applies to daily life: your resting metabolic rate. RMR is a ratio of weight, height, and age. Metabolism—the rate at which I process my calorie intake—declines with age, as we all know. So it’s important to determine your RMR.

My weight is still 71kilos (155lbs), for example, but I’ve now shrunk to 1.75M (5’9”), and I’m 82, which equals a resting metabolic rate of approximately 1350cal. That’s how much it takes to stay comfortably alive each day. If I eat more than that minimum, the excess will be stored as fat—unless I use those extra calories in activity. Just waking up and walking or sitting around uses a few—very few.

Exercise uses more. My average 30m per day of cycling, which takes some two hours and change, consumes between 800 to 1600 calories. My club rides in Tucson all end at some coffee shop, where I can assure you I refuel. A popular slogan has it that a bicycle is a vehicle that “runs on apples and bananas.” To that list I’d add scones and cinnamon buns…

Nowadays it’s easy to track calories-used. My bike computer does it. So does my Apple watch. The whole matter of weight-gain does not deserve the attention lavished upon it. Once again, it’s a simple matter of eating no more calories than you use each day.

Emphasis upon “each day.” I no longer take any days off—except when dictated by travel—for I can no longer improve. Rest days once helped prepare for competition, for it’s only in competition that you have a full sense of the quality of your training.

So exercise has many benefits, but the biggest one is pleasure. I do it every day because I love it.

But it’s worth recalling Charles Schulz’ answer to the question why he made Charley Brown such a loser. “Well,” he said, winning is great, but it’s not funny.”

I still race, of course, but—while there are thousands in my age group in the state, there are only two of us now in Arizona still competing. Franz is two years younger though, so I’m looking forward to aging up…

SAILING & TEACHING

“I always go to sea as a sailor,” Melville (1819-1892) has his character Ishmael say, as his ship Pequod sets out toward its fatal encounter with Moby Dick. Melville uses this line to set up a joke about how men aboard ship do not observe the sixth rule of Pythagoras: “Abstain from beans.”

I want to use it, however, to compare sailing and teaching. Melville was 21 when he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet, about the same age as Thoreau (1817-1862) when he asked permission to use a small parcel of Emerson’s and on the shore of Walden Pond to build himself a cottage. The men were both of an age, that is, close to that of my college students—and to ourselves at the time we have gathered here recollect—young and just setting out on their lives.

I use the verb deliberately: It’s not by chance that “course” describes both a plotted route and a study plan. Each day—each class or course—is open to possibility and invention, however much I’ve prepared, planned, and practiced…

I chanced one day to see an ad in the Stanford Magazine: a letter inquiring whether any alum might be interested serving as crew aboard a 45foot ketch, to sail from Toulon to Kotor. I wrote to the address, and a few months later stepped off the TGV from Paris to meet Alan Logan. The other crew member was a French psychiatrist named Phillipe.

Sailing depends upon the wind. The best wind runs before storms. So sailing affords intense moments, like trying alongside Phillipe to maintain my footing on the cabin sole at night, in a 30knot gale, halfway across the Gulf of Taranto, struggling to reef sections of mainsail, the wind tearing at the canvas, slippery with driving rain.

Sounds a lot more dramatic than opening the door to my classroom in the morning, but that’s only because the actions are different. The risks are the same.

They’re also the ones we ourselves faced as 20-year-olds undertaking to navigate lives and careers. There are few experiences more demanding—requiring both courage and preparation—than addressing an audience at that age, at least some of their minds open and inquisitive.

There’s a cynical description of college teaching as “the act of casting artificial pearls before real swine.” I reject that.

Consider the fact that Thoreau built himself a tiny house just a few miles from his hometown of Concord. Then he wrote about the adventures in thought he undertook each day, as full of incident as any Melville reported from his ocean voyage. For after all what we have from each of them is a story, undertaken finally in imagination rather than in fact. If any part of my life has been worthwhile, it will have been those thoughts I offered to my students…

TIME & MEANING

Consciousness confers on us the unusual powers of memory and imagination. These allow our minds to create the illusion of past and future. Unlike most of the concepts consciousness introduces into experience and implants in language, the illusion of past and future is easy to expose.

On the last leg of a six-day cycling race in France, I fell in with a young guy from Boston who, unlike most people, was enthusiastic after he asked about my work and I said I’d been a philosophy professor. As we rode along, he asked for an example of the sort of things I think about.

I told him about once seeing a sign in front of a tavern when we’d been hiking around Zermatt. It said: FREE BEER TOMORROW.

“Why don’t they ever have to give away any beer?” I asked. He hesitated. “Because it’s never tomorrow?” he said. “Just so,” I said. “So that means,” he said, “there’s always only today.”

I agreed with him again. “Yesterday” and “tomorrow” don’t name locations. They are projections of memory and imagination. Time, in other words, is a function of human consciousness. There is indeed a flow of events and processes, but it is we who divide it into periods, in the same way that we impose things like longitude and latitude upon the world and section the planet into time zones.

So the world and time don’t have qualities apart from our interests. Similarly, the world and our lives in it have no meaning. No meaning, that is, other than what we designate as meaningful. In this way meaning is like our feelings: it originates in us just feelings are not caused by things but assigned to them by me.

So the world has neither qualities or meaning, until we interpret it.

It would be no surprise if you found this assertion threatening. For it does threaten our desire to have the world answer to our needs; to have our lives fulfilled in some way by history. But the universe has no purpose, just as it’s expansion has no direction.

Of course an important ingredient in this desire of ours to have the world answer to our needs is our awareness—also uniquely human—that we will die. I have at some point to give up my life, though other lives, and the course of the world, will continue. It’s a frightening thing to know. So much so that we are anxious to avoid directly addressing death.

We want our lives to go on, and have, over all the millenia since consciousness arose, invented schemes and stories to tell ourselves we can live forever. Such beliefs are fantasies. Yet in every language and culture there have been those who have questioned beliefs of this sort. Questions are the path to wisdom…

PHENOMENOLOGY & EXISTENCE

Philosophy arose in 6th century BCE Athens and, in Greek, means “love of wisdom.” It’s a popular misconception that wisdom means having answers. That’s false. The quality of wisdom depends upon questions. “Questions are the essence of freedom, because they can always be asked, whereas answers can only be enforced.”

There were two great philosophers in the 20th century, one Austrian—Ludwig Wittgenstein—and one German—Martin Heidegger. Their parallel but linked interpretations produced a fundamental divide between “Continental” philosophy and the “Anglo-American” school, Wittgenstein’s guiding question was “what is language?” Heidegger’s: “What is Being?”

Philosophy at Stanford in the 50s was “linquistic analysis,” as the practice deriving from Wittgenstein had come to be called. I became interested in “phenomenology”—the method originating in German thought. There were only two U.S. university departments supporting such studies; one of them was Penn State, which is where I wrote my PhD dissertation under John Anderson.

Heidegger’s question “what is Being?” revives the oldest inquiry in the history of philosophy. The first thing we discover in asking the question is that consciousness a uniquely human ability: we are capable simultaneously of doing something and of being aware we are doing it.

That is, consciousness—or mind—always has a dual quality. This experience of duality misleads us into picturing the world—like we ourselves—to have two aspects: one in the foreground, the other in the background. “Appearance” and “reality” exemplify this mistake, as do “mind” and “body,” “subject” and “object,” and many more.

The word “phenomenon” means “appearance.” So the first insight of phenomenology is that there are only appearances. The second is that things appear only to us. In other words, only humans have the power to attend to the world—or the environment—as a whole process. All modern knowledge, especially the sciences, depends upon this power.

“To exist” means to “stand out.” It follows that only humans exist: only human being—that is human consciousness—can both occupy a position and bring the world into relation to that position. This is a brief version of one of Heidegger’s early insights.

One way to grasp the significance of this insight is to realize it is the basis of our knowledge of death. Memory and imagination enable us to extend our awareness, recalling a past and projecting a future. So I am able to imagine a time at which I’ve ceased to exist, a world in I am no longer present. This is the source of our deepest hatred and fear…

What's a vacation?

 Can you "vacation" when you're already retired? The word was coined to mean temporarily leaving your job behind, to clear your mind and revive your spirits. We--Jane and me--are stretching the limits of the word, along with many 1000s of Americans and others: people with enough money to travel, as well as the time throughout the year. It's arguably the case that "vacation" travelers--tourists--have become a primary source of income for many states and countries.

We were discussing this just last night with the couple sharing a rented house with us here on the South Carolina coast. They've recently returned from traveling in South Africa--both the country and the region--and admit to having questions about the morality of living amongst native populations who individually and collectively have low incomes and even lower employment, such that their livelihoods depend upon the money travelers like us spend locally. 

These photos are from our cycling trip on the east coast of Italy last year, where we were housed in a bike hotel owned by friends and guided by young people hired to ride with people like us. Tourism is already largest portion of the budgets of many countries like Italy.

So travel and tourism may not be a moral question at all. Or if it is, it might be argued that it's the moral duty of the citizens of countries with thriving production- and export-economies to go to the Mediterranean and Caribbean, Africa and South America, and so on to spread the wealth. In fact there's a "travel industry" that most prominently features the production and flight of aircraft. This means that, while we're spreading the wealth, we're also distributing carbon and other forms of pollution.

But then, being human is clearly synonymous with pollution: we can only live by inflicting very high levels of predation and consumption on the land around us. And there are already too many of us. Think about that when you're traveling...