'Humility Is Attentive Patience.'

-Simone Weil

I am entirely aware that sometimes on here when I go off on a tirade about compassion, my diction can get a bit too soaring or florid. Sometimes both, frankly, and when I get to the inestimable consequences of compassion my tone is apt to run from hortatory to incantatory through beatific and on to splenetic long before righting itself and sticking nicely to the pragmatic.

However.

My excuse is that what I am talking about is every bit as powerful as I make it seem. It is like a drug: its effects are that shocking, marked, and fast acting. And yet, most of us do not avail ourselves of it, except perhaps with those closest to us. And that stands to reason. Family members are on the one hand easier to understand than those we know less well; on the other, our hobby and pool of defendants would quickly evaporate were we to spend all our time divorcing and disinheriting our relatives. Given that fact, it makes sense at some point simply to accept that Aunt Jane always talks to much about Shih-tzus and Cousin David will probably never fully surmount his persecution complex.

Fine.

But leaving aside altruism (which we already were, anyway; admit it), it benefits every individual's own psyche to stop seeing others as failed versions of ourselves. Even if we share some similar goals - getting ahead in the company, working on our marriages, shopping less, not drinking anymore, being more involved in the community, cooking at home more often, working out again, whatever they might be - we are going at them with radically differing histories, distinct personalities, weaknesses, and strengths, and perhaps for vastly different reasons in the first place.

It was probably Thérèse of Lisieux who had this additional insight into handling difficult interactions with irritating interlocutors, particularly those whose failings seem most obvious to us, those whom we know enough about to wish instinctively to judge in their failure: Yes, maybe he did do it again -- but what about all the times he succeeded, and we weren't there, and he was too modest to gloat, or even tell us quietly of his unnoticed, private success?

I think looking at the evident weaknesses of others from that perspective is profound. We don't even need to do any uncomfortable self-inquiry to come up with something we ourselves recently struggled with, which is an equally useful but more obvious and labor-intensive strategy. We just have to acknowledge that we can't possibly know everything about another, and that that other might well be doing some rather good stuff while we're not around. And, that he might additionally have the virtue of humility, and thus even be worth emulating in that respect!

I say it is like a drug because whatever method we use to get there once we feel a sympathy with our brother and his situation, the anger dissolves just as surely as morphine kills pain. If you can imagine that someone is driving aggressively (I use driving so much because it does truly render people insane when they are trapped in their little boxes and feel so powerless about many factors and any little thing can seem a tremendous injustice) because his wife just had a baby or because he needs to throw up, you immediately lose the anger. If someone's stereo is playing crappy music too loud, it's not much of a stretch to recall that most of us were young at one time, too, and wanted to be cool and to display our coolness when possible so that it could be validated by others, as coolness, just like wit, style, or 'success,' is a cultural commodity which can only be conferred on an aspirant by the recognition of its presence by a consensus of the relevant audience. He's young, the music's bad, I'm not his target audience: so, so what? After the next light I can go back to listening to the riveting story about heirloom orchids in Florida.

I like the Thérèse suggestion because even if we were never young ourselves, and even if we can come up with absolutely no failings of our own to gain us conditional entry into some grandiose vision of the Mystical Brotherhood of Common Human Frailty, we can easily imagine that the individual tiresomely prattling on to us about the after-market package he bought for his Lexus could just have donated to the Red Cross, and is thus as short of sense as he is glucose and the blood to carry it to his brain.

It Goes On...

This is from the Weather Underground. I wanted to go down today after work and take pictures of the rhododendrons and bonsai at the rhododendron and bonsai gardens in Federal Way. (That's a city, not a manner of doing things, in this state.) But there is no sun. There was what we call here a 'sunbreak,' perhaps even two, but not enough to justify my trek.

5-Day Forecast for ZIP Code 98117

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Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Monday
56° F | 43° F 13° C | 6° C	63° F | 45° F 17° C | 7° C	59° F | 45° F 15° C | 7° C	56° F | 45° F 13° C | 7° C	58° F | 45° F 14° C | 7° C
Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation	Partly Cloudy	Chance of Rain 30% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 30% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation
Hourly	Hourly	Hourly	Hourly	Hourly
Tomorrow is forecast to be Warmer than today.

I love many things about Seattle. And I think that, despite our thousands of new cookie-cutter condo developments and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments that could just as easily be in Anaheim or Shanghai, there still remains much here to set it apart from other cities of similar size, latitude, demographics, etc. And all you hear about our rainfall is not true: we don't get an extraordinary amount. We are 50-something, I think, in US cities: all the leaders are in the Southeastern United States. What we do get is months upon months of unremitting gloom. It's not especially cold here, either, particularly considering that we're almost in Canada. But what our snuggle with the 49th Parallel does mean is that our winter days are as brief as they should be at this latitude. When you add in the fact that we get none of those glorious brisk sunny days most other people get intermittently through the winter, you are faced with the reality that our lot is a bunch of short dark days: even when the sun is out, it's not, and then it's back to complete darkness at half-past-four or something.

What also have is a lot of bars, and a lot of suicides. But then spring comes, and there is a riot of color everywhere, including every conceivable and comforting shade of green. The streets are lined with cherry blossoms, and rhododendron bushes and trees bloom from white to purple in yards everywhere. By the time the two months of summer are upon us, no one in the Puget Sound region cooks a single meal inside, and it takes triple the time to get anywhere, as all the bridges are up and down constantly to allow for the the thousands of sailboats, accompanied by canoes, kayaks, bowriders, converted liveaboard tugs, dinghies, trawlers on hiatus, and the lamentable cigarette boats to pass under in hoardes. White legs that would shame Dublin are everywhere, not a play is produced or a concert offered, and tourists are the only people eating in restaurants. The failed suicides of February are out at Greenlake in preposterously colored clingy clothes, thirty pounds lighter, completely sober, and practicing asanas with the emotional stability and optimism of any Self-Actualized Man worth his mudra.

It's a shocking way of life.

St. Nic

I smoked a bit recently, and more than I would have liked, once I woke up the next morning wishing I were dead. I used to smoke, though, and less than I would have liked at the time, as I would have, were it possible, smoked in class, at yoga, at the symphony, in the shower, and while asleep. Now, by contrast, I smoke perhaps a cigarette or two a month, if the situation presents itself and I feel like it.

I didn't grow up smoking, or even around smokers. The only smokers at boarding school were what seemed to me frighteningly mature European voluptuaries with recklessly free-style hair and a penchant for wool vests, and louche Americans whose older sisters brought them drugs for their birthdays. Later, though, once I was married, I would keep a pack of cigarettes in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer, and once every couple of months take one out and smoke it while cleaning house. Sometimes my husband and I would each have one, walking around the lake or sitting at table after dinner. I didn't know how to inhale, but the act of it was pleasurable, and I liked the smell.

Once my husband turned gay and I moved to Greece, it was a bit different. In Greece, smoking it not merely encouraged, it is nearly enforced. My first memorable Greek smoking experience was being offered a cigarette in a bank by the teller as consolation for a lengthy but inexplicable wait. I gleefully (I'm smoking in a bank! I'm smoking in a bank!) accepted both the cigarette and a light off his Zippo, and felt dangerous and sophisticated and almost truly Hellenic myself. I wished Veronica Lake or Alan Ladd could have been there to see that I now could wait for a train as fashionably as they could.

My brands of choice were Gauloises and Kiretsiler, both very spicy, rich, and aromatic. You can't get Kiretsiler outside Greece, and these days in North America you have to go to Canada to get Gauloises, but those were simpler times, and smokier. I eventually learned to inhale, but I figured it was unlikely I would become addicted, as being attached to, or consumed by, things, was never one of my especial weaknesses. Eventually I did, but it took a long time and I enjoyed both before and after. I never felt much of a 'rush,' but perhaps that was because with not inhaling for so long, the amount of nicotine I was receiving very gradually built up as my smoking expertise developed.

Any arousing aspects seemed more to come from the physicality of smoking, not what was actually being inhaled. I didn't like to feel any kind of intoxication, and would always eschew pain medications after surgeries, so that suited me well. I knew there was nicotine, and nicotine was some kind of mild stimulant, but so was caffeine, and that didn't seem to be a big concern for most of the people who loved coffee, as evidenced by the overall lack of ruined espresso junkies in business suits begging for Change for a Venti Please outside Starbucks.

At the same time, I knew that cigarettes were implicated in heart disease, emphysema, lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, asthma, sinusitis, high blood pressure, COPD, digestive problems, dental problems, circulation problems, arterial sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, and just about everything else except Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, with regard to which there exists an inverse association. But, we are all going to die of something, and while smoking-related deaths are among the more ghastly and prolonged ways of accomplishing this, I would have no ethical or logistical problem with using my last Social Security check to buy a Glock and avoid Stage Four of anything, particularly since I would be, if not of sound body, at least of sound mind at that point, owing to nicotine's anti-Alzheimer's properties.

So that was fine. I was never a talented smoker, not only remaining ignorant of the arcana of smoke-ring blowing and the esoteric 'French Inhale,' but continuing always to look vaguely ill-at-ease in both embouchure and grip. Nonetheless, I persisted in my hobby, partly because there is nothing like a smoke break when you are going to school 'double full time,' doing an internship, and working thirty hours a week. (And maybe the stimulant action didn't hurt, either, but again, I didn't actually notice it.)

Then, I read about smoking and dopamine. Basically, smoking both inhibits dopamine uptake and promotes the release of more dopamine -just like the clearly psychotropic drugs which had always scared me. Certainly I had heard the oft-recited 'smoking is as/more addictive than heroin/cocaine,' but I didn't think of it as getting me high like that. As I viewed it, I had an addiction to a fairly innocuous drug. There was no euphoria, no distortion of reality, no belief, not even once, that I could fly or pick, unassisted, a good muni fund. Frankly, I didn't even feel more energized after a cigarette. The side effects of the method of delivery, smoking, were odious, to be sure, but the drug itself, nicotine, was not a concern.

Dopamine, by contrast, is a big deal. It is a hormone and a neurotransmitter, and involved in learning, pleasure, reward-oriented behaviors, memory, attention, desire -- in brief, cognition and desire/emotion. As that sunk in, it was patent that I was the same as the cocaine or meth junky. I may not be feeling as high as her or him, but my brain is doing exactly the same things in anticipating and receiving the drug. Studies showed smoker's dopamine levels spike from just seeing a lighter, or even a stepped-on cigarette. Far more so if the smoker's nicotine level is low. Then, when the reward is given, the first puff is smoked, there is another, higher wave of dopamine caressing the smoker's brain.

Which repelled me, so I quit. The first day was hard, because of course you think, Oh, I'm doing X; I should light a cigarette. But then the next day you can look back and see that you survived, and quite handily at that, blow-drying your hair or painting your toenails without one, so it's fine. Moreover, you can answer any momentary But I - with a factual Nooo, you don't, because you don't smoke, darling, because you have proven that you don't, because a smoker would have already had five that day before you started that abortive whinge, so shut up and get on with it, already.