m always on the lookout for examples of people who have gone through great challenges and came out the other end stronger and transformed. This month I’d like to share someone with you who is an answer to my prayer for guidance during these tumultuous times. I’m not sure how I found out about the book, The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eva Eger. Sometimes these gifts just seem to appear at the perfect time. At the age of 16 Dr. Eger was arrested by the Nazis along with her family and sent to Auschwitz. She bravely describes the hell she lived through during the holocaust. Like her fellow survivor and mentor Victor Frankel, she had the ability to bear witness during the worst conditions imaginable. She miraculously survived Auschwitz and other horrors then, after being liberated at the brink of death, faced the ordeal of finding her way as a refugee in America with no money, few resources and unable to speak English. But she persisted through it all being a wife, a mother, then a single mother and eventually, in middle age, she got her doctorate in psychology. Dr. Eger became known for her ability to help people suffering from PTSD and other difficult cases. She died last year at 98. Her stamina and ability to survive is hard to phantom.
A friend pulled out a picture of her three children and I noticed that all of them had eerily delighted smiles on their faces. I asked her how she got them to all smile at the same time and she said, “I did it through Chat GPT”. On her wall is the image of this happy, perfect family who looked like they just got off the polar express movie. I’m watching friends enjoy the latest AI toys with wonder. One friend got free medical advice without having to see a doctor, one an airbrushed image of herself 40 years younger in a leather jacket that convinced her that she would look like this if she bought the jacket, one a well- organized dharma talk with charts put in logical order that was devoid of the juicy human errors that make a teaching so compelling. Some even find an AI boyfriend who doesn’t snore or have any past trauma to deal with. I get it. It’s fun to enter raw data into a computer and be given a clean, ideal version of reality, a reality of certainty where messiness, blemishes and nuances are not a factor. But with all its attraction and usefulness, AI has its limits. Something essential is missing in everything it touches.
Today is Friday, or as it is known in my home, Christmas. Every Thursday night I go to bed with a certain glee that in the morning I will awaken, step out of the warmth of my bed and go to the front door where my CSA box awaits me. For those of you who don’t know, CSA stands for community supported agriculture. It consists of a group of local farmers who form subscription packages. The consumer pays a weekly price and each week the farmer harvests whatever is growing in their garden then delivers the fruits and vegtables and sometimes grains, meats and dairly, to their patrons door. You never know what will be in the box. It’s a brilliant business model that maintains a steady income for the local farmers and provides the very freshest produce, often picked that morning, to the consumer. No middle men, no food designed more for shipping and shelf life than for taste, no destroying the land to obtain the greatest profit.
Indulge me if you will during our brief time together with a game of What If? It’s a game I play by myself regularly and thought it would be fun to share it with you. This is how it goes; we ask the question, what if?, and then use our imagination to pretend, as best we can, that what we are imagining is true. So find a quiet moment to sit back, relax, and enter the world of your imagination. When you feel you are in a good space of mind and body to do so, sit with these questions and take the time to imagine your responses are as real as any other world you inhabit (remember-just reading this list is like eating dry cardboard and will not give the same sensation as applying your imagination to each inquiry):
Hiring a band that has over 16 musicians is expensive. Some groups afforded us by gathering their resources together, as in spaghetti feeds at veteran’s halls. The wealthy could afford to hire us for smaller gatherings like corporate events or country club parties. From my perch I watched them all and was struck by the varied enjoyment levels of each group. The amount of joy on the dance floor seemed to be in direct proportion to the wealth of the patrons. What I noticed, over and over again, was that the wealthier the patrons the less fun they seemed to be having. The spaghetti feeds were joyous events with packed dance floors and deeply appreciative clients letting go and fully enjoying their night out. The least joyful events were groups of wealthy people who appeared more concerned about appearances than having fun. They were more somber, more uptight, less free. I often thought to myself, while up there quietly observing, that I would much prefer to live in the spaghetti feed world. They had less money, less power, less access to material things, but they knew how to enjoy the moments of their lives.
Today I am feeling a flicker of pride in America. Not in our government, but in the people. I’m proud of the creativity of the people in Portland who came to ICE raids dressed as cartoon characters to deflect the image that those at the top would like to portray, proud of the Minnesotans who march down the streets singing so that the people who are afraid to come out of their homes know their neighbors have their back. I’m proud of Alex Pretti who said during a service for one of his veteran patients, “Today we remember that freedom is not free, we have to work for it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.” I’m proud of my community who have sustained peaceful efforts and spoke out about the injustices early on.
