Endings and Improv

“Fifty years earlier, in a state of agitated anxiety, he had told an interviewer, ‘I don’t care about being forgotten. I fear getting to the end of my life and feeling I’ve wasted it. I don’t want to get to the end and think I haven’t tasted enough and touched other people enough and had a good enough time,’” wrote Mark Harris in his superb biography: Mike Nichols — A Life.

“In old age, that fear had vanished. All of his desperate urgency had given way to a serenity he had taken a lifetime to find. At one of his favorite restaurants, he had lunch with a friend whose son was about to go out on his own; he was looking for some advice he could share. Did he have any wisdom he could offer?

“He thought for a moment.

“’Well,’ he said, ‘just s long as he knows that things that start out poorly don’t always end poorly.’

He thought some more.

‘That,’ he said, ‘and study improv.’”

The Fracking of the Mind

I’ve long been aware what a dreadful attention sink we’re in now as a society.

It’s a topic that Laura Marsh talks about in the March 27, 2025, New York Review of Books.

“In The Attention Merchants, (Tim) Wu likened these developments to another kind of resource extraction. The smartphone ‘appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way that fracking would later recover vast reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible.’ Wu, a legal scholar who has written extensively on antitrust, tells this story through sketches of the corporations that unlocked new segments of our attention. (Chris) Hayes writes more often from the perspective of the user; the person whose mind is being fracked feels, he remarks, ‘that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.’ Distraction has always been big business, but the immersive quality of digital media, in his account, makes it much more powerful and toxic.”

“(T)he algorithms of social networks can show each user content tailored specifically to them, based on all the things they’ve clicked on before. (This is how Hayes loses an entire hour, one stoned evening, watching videos of people assembling sandwiches and slicing them in half.)

“Social media can also capitalize on direct appeals to the audience by name. One of the more intriguing facts that Hayes cites comes from a 1959 study of people’s ability to tune out background noise and conversation when they wanted to focus: ‘The only stimulus so far found that will break through,’ the researchers wrote, ‘is the subject’s own name.’ Platforms that notify users each time they are ‘mentioned’ work on this principle; the most reliable way to draw someone in, even if the content on offer doesn’t particularly appeal to them, is by creating the impression that other people are talking about them.”

If Only This, If Only That

“Moods dictate my behavior,” wrote Stephen Batchelor in Buddhism Without Belief.

“If something makes me feel good, I want to have it; if it makes me feel bad, I want to get rid of it; if it leaves me indifferent, I ignore it. I find myself in a perpetual state of conflict: emotionally pulled one way and pushed the other. Yet underpinning both attraction and aversion is craving: the childish and utopian search for a situation in which I finally possess everything I desire and have repelled everything I dislike. Deep down I insist that a permanent, separate self is entitled to a life removed from the contingencies and uncertainties of existence.

“And I invest my icons of craving with absolute finality. Be they sex, fame or wealth, they shine before me with an intoxicating allure unsullied by the ambiguities of lived experience. 

“I do not consider their implications. Diapers and tantrums figure as little in my fantasies of sexual conquest as do journalists and taxes in my daydreams of fame and wealth.”

“Instead of solving my problems, this new situation replaces them with others I had never suspected. Yet rather than accepting this as the nature of living in an unreliable world, rather than learning to be content with success and joy and not to be overwhelmed by failure and pain, rather than appreciating life’s poignant, tragic and sad beauty, I grit my teeth and struggle on in thrall to that quiet, seductive voice that whispers “If only…”

Carefully the Crow

Carefully the crow

soaks its prized piece of popcorn

in the water dish.

A Glass Half Broken

Psychiatrist and philosophical seeker Mark Epstein had a question for the Buddhist monk Achaan Chaa, who lived in a forest hermitage on the Thai-Lao border,

“What are you really talking about?” Epstein asked him. “What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving?’”

“Achaan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us, he spoke in the chirpy Lao dialect that was his native tongue; ‘You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.’

“Achaan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.”

USA RIP

In 2001, I feared that unbridled lies disguised as journalism on Fox News, coupled with the corruption of the GOP and the excuse of 9-11 terrorism, could lead to a fascist dictatorship in America and the death of the Constitution. 

Well, despite the best efforts of many of us, here we are. 

What now? 

What next?

I guess we can only hope that on some finer day in the future, the words “Republican Party” will be greeted with the same visceral, historical loathing that the term “Nazi Party” inspires.

The Clock in the Storm

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

And to think that Stevenson lived in the 19th century, not the 21st. I have long maintained that mindfulness practice is a necessary antidote to the digital age’s unabated assault on our attention and ability to focus.