I didn’t know at first that Herbert Deane had been functionally cashiered, reduced from a sterling administrative career to just another poli sci prof at Columbia University, and that his story was a harbinger of the dangers that have landed squarely in the American way of college. He was there at the very inflection point where power shifted from the faculty to the student body, for better or worse.

A decade before I encountered him, Deane had been the vice dean of graduate faculties at Columbia. Amid the campus unrest of the late Sixties, he told the school newspaper: “Whether students vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a given issue means as much to me as if they were to tell me they like strawberries.”

When James Simon Kunen wrote a book about the Columbia protests against the war machine and the school imposing its will on a neighboring Harlem community, he titled it The Strawberry Statement. Dean Deane, as he was portrayed, never lived it down.

Fifty years later, the transformation is complete. Students grade their professors, take them to purity court, and claim that their provocations in class are harmful.

Which professors are best at navigating the eggshells that have been spread under their feet? I asked a professor friend of mine. “Oh that’s easy,” he said. “The ones who act like high school teachers.” He meant the professors who teach to the test, by rote, and are cheerful and validating at all times.

This is horrifying to many of us, of course, who looked at college as a place to be challenged, to deconstruct belief systems, raise new ones, and to seek truth. We knew our professors were fallible, but we trusted that they would introduce us to new pairs of glasses. Some of us didn’t even care whether they were good performers or seemed to like us; ideas could trump entertainment. We are called elitist for these simple-minded views. It’s too bad. It’s not elitist to make up your own mind after first exploring how all sides have viewed it. What’s weird is that the experts at critical theory think it’s perfectly normal to research (meaning read, analyze, explore) the writings and activities of the bad guys – predators, Nazis, racists, imperialists – but their students must be protected from being contaminated by such materials. It boggles the mind, in both ways.

Last Sunday I tried to run a marathon. I’m old and with first an Achilles tendon setback and then a hip bursitis waylaying, I trained barely the minimum. A couple of days beforehand, Annie asked my chances to finish, and I said, “50-50 maybe.”

My legs showed up fresh, and ten miles of dawn along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, Marina District, and later in the morning up and across the Golden Gate Bridge rode by breezily. Heading downhill toward the Sausalito harbor, my right hip suddenly cried out with a shooting pain, almost electrical. I limped a few yards and stopped, walked, healed apparently, and started again. Two minutes later the hip screamed again. After a few more stops and starts, my hip was obviously shot for the day. Avoiding the elbows of legions of diligent joggers, I limped back across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, where at the halfway mark I stepped off the route and called Annie for a ride home.

No one likes being interrupted. Doubling the insult, I waited amid hundreds of pleased-with-themselves half-marathoners adorned with jolly ribbons and giant medals. Because I had set my sights higher, I was undeserving of reward.

Now let’s go back in time. Long before I became a runner, three streams carried me through my grade school years: teachers during the day, adventuring along the creek with my friends after school, and reading stories and novels before lights out.

Reading enveloped me in a sensory deprivation tank, removing the material world and allowing my imagination to run riot. I seamlessly strolled in estate gardens with Miss Marple, or caves with Frank and Joe Hardy, or castle towers with Hamlet, rivers with Tom Sawyer, galaxies with Meg Murry, dismal backstreets with Sherlock Holmes, or urban walkups with Sam Spade. I was submerged.

“Neal! Get up here and take out the trash!” My chosen world, opened for me by Agatha Christie or Madeleine L’Engle that night, instantly collapsed. Mom again, with her nasty way of interrupting.

Interruption runs a close second to death as a chief cause of dread. At work, interruption means a new wretchedly pointless activity. In play, it means responsibilities calling. In traffic it’s a jam. Or the power goes out. It rains. A friend in need calls. A dubious charge on my credit card.

We all learn to dread interruption in childhood. Kid life revolves around the theatrics of play, the concentration of online games or reading, and the constant possibility of daydreaming. No matter how hungry the child, dinner gets in the way of kid life. So do chores, family time, and shopping trips. Babysitters and substitute teachers are OK because they are so tentative that they’ll go along with the kid’s plan endlessly.

No one told me that every other kid hated doing the dishes as much as I did and for the same reason: The chore waylaid them from a better kid pursuit like beating up their little brother. No one told me that life was one long interruption after another, mainly. Everyone acted as if an interruption was a one-off, a small thing.

By not facing the reality that interruption is ceaseless, it’s as if we’ve been trained for an imaginary world where it’s possible to stay on task for days or weeks, start to finish, and aren’t things going smoothly? Like we’re humpback whales singing along. No one stuck in our complex civilization lives like that. Everything breaks down, especially the tractor. Everyone forgets to show up for you, especially your cousin Bert.

If projects went swimmingly, without interruption, I could get a lot more done! Yikes, the reward would be more projects, more complications, just seamless ones instead of start-stop ones.

As I’ve considered interruption more closely, and noticed its frequency and triggers of annoyance, the possibility that interruption is neither a good thing nor a bad thing has opened up. Who knows whether what I am doing right now has more pleasurable potential than the experience that follows the interruption? With age, doing the dishes becomes a playful puzzle rather than an onerous beat-down. Can the very notion that projects are threads with beginnings, middles, and ends be upended? Aren’t they all temporary landings during an unplanned and unpredictable life?

Smooth sailing imagines that I’m in a gulf-stream existence, being drawn along a reputable course toward a well-managed port. But if I look more closely, I never land where I expected, and most of the joy has happened well before the conclusion. Plus, even my memories feel like isolated experiences, not threads of meaning.

What do you hear when someone says it’s not the destination, it’s the journey? A linear path, right, as if the trail you picked shows up just how you imagined it and you’re marching through a well-blazed route, but in your professed state of presence looking around a little more as you go, and maybe affording a glimpse of red maples.

I’m not sure about that. I think one reason it’s not the destination is that every step alters the route slightly, and my self-narration alters it even more. What I expected out of the route disappears. Where am I exactly? If I’m watching closely, an unexpected, novel experience arises in the moment. And the next moment. And the next one. Those are interruptions in a way, aren’t they?

On the house-flipping TV show Flip or Flop co-host Christina Haack frequently substituted for the word “like,” as in “I like potatoes,” the word “obsessed.” Over and over she was obsessed by this or that kitchen backsplash, especially if it was the narrow strip type called glass mosaic tile. For a couple of years, Annie and I reported to each other being “obsessed with” green chiles, walks in the woods, tissue paper, swimming in warm water, a cup of coffee, and welcome mats.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea that all experiences are transitional, and equal in magnitude. I’ve been further obsessed with noticing that things don’t end so much as make room for a brand new thing. Instead of “having trouble with transitions,” maybe I can live an all-transitional life.

I’ve signed up for another marathon in October. I think my training will go very well.

I don’t usually write about automobiles.

The first car I owned was a powder blue 1966 Volvo 122S, shaped like a miniature ’40 Ford. With two carburetors, 30 mpg, and bucket seats, what it lacked in outward pizzazz was made up for by a cool lean-back-and-cruise style. I’m pretty sure I bought it in 1977 for $225.

My current ride is a black 2023 Hyundai Kona Limited EV. It’s blocky and pedestrian, but with Harman Kardon sound, a 254-mile range, and a smooth, quick engine, it’s already a lock for my hall of fame.

In between I’ve commanded another Volvo, a Saab, a Jeep, two Toyotas, a Datsun, three BMWs, a Jag, a Mazda, a Dodge, a Chevy, and a Chrysler. Or put another way, one one-seater (the Jeep had been a postal vehicle), eight sedans, a pickup truck, two minivans, and two station wagons. Plus a Harley dirt bike which I sold the day after I rode it drunk. It was either drinking or motorcycling.

I’m writing this for the kids, who didn’t know cars in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, before the precise robotic factories of the modern age.

Cars used to break down.

You just never knew.

We grew up a little more fatalistically in the Fifties and Sixties, stranded on the shoulders of roads with the hood up while Dad despaired, smoke poured out, and Mom handed us graham crackers from her front seat stash.

Tires blew, radiators sprung leaks, water pumps failed, gaskets and belts shredded, fuel lines and spark plugs clogged, mufflers fell off, oil sprayed, fuses blew, wires melted, engines knocked, and god help you if a piston ring wore out. With the exception of that last, the feared timing belt of our days, all these disasters happened to every car, usually within the first 60,000 miles. Plus before sunset you couldn’t get a good AM radio signal ten miles outside of town.

Standing around and waiting for a wrecker was routine. You prayed for a Good Samaritan to stop and agree to tell the service station up the road to send a tow truck. Or else Dad trudged off over the horizon. Gas stations were manned by mechanics, and just about every one sported a tow truck parked nose out, ready to rescue. Back on the shoulder, a couple of balls and a Frisbee were kept in the trunk for emergency amusement. Later, as cruising teenagers stuck at the side of the road we’d hustle our baggy of weed into the fringe woods in case a cop stopped to get us help. I missed my girlfriend’s graduation from college because my yellow Volvo 142’s engine with 114,000 miles on it seized. People were late a lot and a breakdown was a believable excuse.

This was all completely normal. Rich people were as conditioned to it as poor people; fancy cars were the most finicky. Everyone knew that Italian cars were fried by unreliable electrical systems, German cars blew gaskets, Cadillac suspensions collapsed, and while Japanese cars were better built they were too small.

Everything automotive-wise started to change in 1974 when the Mideast oil cartel raised gas prices by controlling supply. Gas lines were bad, but dollar-per-gallon fuel was worse. Now these Japanese light cars with high miles per gallon suddenly made sense. Detroit scrambled to imitate them, but their first efforts were laughably inferior. My favorite was the anemic, three-cylinder Chevy Chevette owned by my friend Bob. A 40-horsepower VW Bug could get up a hill faster than the Chevette. Plus the Chevette broke down a lot even by 1970s standards. (Bob had a thing for brie cheese, which sour smell permeated the Chevette’s plastic; he also played a single Carpenters eight-track on permanent repeat. I never complained; cars were the only freedom a young man had, and if your buddy owned one, you accepted his bad taste in accompaniments.)

The motorsport press compared the US and Japan econoboxes and pointed out that the imports were far more effective at getting you where you wanted to go. But between brand loyalty, built-in-America jingoism, and young buyers interested more in style than substance, it took thirty years for American cars to catch up in reliability. Service stations held on to their tow trucks. And owners of Japanese cars knew not to spoil the Detroit party by mentioning that their cars didn’t break.

Neither of my Toyotas, both Eighties cars, ever broke down. Every other car of mine built before the 21^st Century aged poorly, until my first BMW, a 1999 740, which was last seen at 245,000 miles without a serious service problem. For all I know it’s still going. That tank was bulletproof.

So if you don’t know cars before the turn of this century, you might think it’s in the DNA of cars to run and run, and repairs are the fault of negligent owners.

Unfortunately, I have a long memory.

A little over a year ago, I aged out of my wonderful 2014 Chevy Spark, built in Korea. Spiffy in all other respects if a bit basic and slow, known as the Half-A-Car for its ability to squeeze into non-spaces, the Spark’s cramped cockpit severely tested my 35-inch inseam. As I neared 70 years old, it got harder to unbend my stiffened legs when emerging from the car. So I researched rides with superior driver legroom.

Eventually I settled on a BMW 530e, which is a bells-and-whistles plug-in hybrid. What the hell, I thought. Let’s have fun. It happened that I had just received the biggest book advance of my life. Did you know that Raymond Carver blew his first big advance, from Scorsese to draft a script based on The Brothers Karamazov, on a brand new Mercedes? I did.

BMWs are designed to appeal to aggressive young men who like to take curves too fast, smash down on jackrabbit starts, and blast along two-lane blacktops at ninety. Which my 530e could do; the manufacturer even added a special fun button that re-tuned the engine to add forty horsepower for 10-second stretches.

Every setting can be adjusted on a BMW, and if you plug in a reader, all sorts of hidden settings are unlocked. A rainbow effect can be added to the interior lighting, the seat warmer can automatically come on at the ambient temperature of your choice, and the ride can be softened or hardened exactly to your liking if you have the adaptive suspension.

Motorheads don’t build BMWs. Electricians and programmers do. Hundreds of relays and monitors and controllers are hidden under the trunk, behind the dashboard, in the doors, and around the engine compartment.

The more I enjoyed fiddling with the settings and customizing my ride, the more worried I got. Let’s say an average car has a couple of hundred points of failure with a dozen that might be catastrophic. A BMW seems to have thousands of the former and several dozen of the latter. As a BMW owner you can run an online diagnostic report that will typically return as many as fifty inconsequential failures in a month, usually monitors briefly noting that a particular brake or loudspeaker sensor hadn’t operated for a fraction of a second.

The more I drove the car, the more it seemed to resemble the automobiles I grew up with, a steady anticipation of trouble. This was irrational; the car never broke down and none of its visible systems failed even for a nanosecond. But by the third month I was online daily, investigating when things would start falling apart. This, despite having purchased breakdown insurance that would take me safely to 2029. I discovered a world of 530e haters in pitched Reddit battles with its rabid defenders. They all knew so much more than me; how could I be so naïve to buy a car that was designed to be coddled, not driven? Wretched a/c compressors, flimsy CV boots, buggy head units. No repair under $1,000, some over $5,000. At least when one of the carburetors blew on my Volvo 122s in 1973, I could buy a rebuild kit for fifteen dollars and repair it myself. BMW technicians have the training of microsurgeons.

But as it turned out, it was something else entirely that closed my mind to the joy that had accompanied the first weeks of owning this supercar. One day when we were returning from a No Kings rally, folded softly into the sleek cabin, blasting the Dead through its souped-up sound system, I mentioned to Annie that I might slap on an EAT THE RICH bumper sticker.

“You can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“You can’t put an EAT THE RICH bumper sticker on a BMW.”

From that moment I recognized that I was a douche driving a douche car.

I wore shades and kept a cap with a big, low brim on when I drove through town, like Larry David midway through a Curb episode. I got my chores done and scuttled home. No more joy rides.

Within weeks I had replaced the mighty 530e with my little Kona Limited EV. Which can park in almost as tight spaces as my Chevy Spark, now driven by our grandson. The modest Kona has a nearly as good sound system as the Bimmer, more sprightliness, far better sightlines, smoother driving assistance, as comfortable seats, and all the controls and settings that a regular human being might need and no more. Only South Korea haters (are there any?) would call me a douche for driving it, and I can wave at my neighbors. There’s a better than 50-50 chance it won’t break down tomorrow.

1. The voice isn’t deep inside you. It’s not part of your subconscious self. If you search for it, you’ll notice that it whispers to you from near the surface, not from your recesses. That’s because it mediates the authentic self’s interactions with the outside world.

2. It’s a bully. Using the inflections of an absent parent, it constantly reminds you that you’re not fully equipped to succeed in the world, and urges you to be meek.

3. It always exaggerates social danger.

4. It tells you lies: that you’re a wounded six-year-old, that love is transactional and must be pursued, and that your worth is dependent on how others see you.

5. It does not have your best interests in mind. After it has finished its work of teaching you the basics (right/wrong, good/bad, safety), and having run out of new ideas, the inner critic’s only interest is its own survival. To stay in charge, it has to continually persuade you that you are a child in a world of adults.

6. You are a better decisionmaker than your inner critic. You are a sophisticated adult who is perfectly moral. Being moral just means you know what’s right; it doesn’t mean you always do what you know is right. The inner critic repeating slogans fit for children is not helpful in any way.

7. The inner critic tells you that you have made bad decisions. In fact, when you made that decision, you performed a proper risk/benefit computation. Based on the information you had, you made a choice between two good options. Because we’re deciding in murky waters, without visibility into all the variables, some choices go sideways. It wasn’t a bad decision. It was a decision that went sideways.

8. If you’re reading this, you have a perfect record at adjusting to misfortune. So does everybody around you. Overcoming obstacles isn’t a big deal. My superpower isn’t achievement. My superpower is adaptation. So is yours. So is every human’s. Not something my inner critic wants me to hear.

9. Fortunately, the inner critic is a vampire. It only succeeds in the dark of night, hidden from sight. It whispers subvocally. But if I stop and play back what it’s saying, bringing it to the light of day, the inner critic weakens. I notice that I have been taking direction from the dumbest bully in the back of the class.

10. What if I’m fine already? What if I can lay off the self-improvement and notice how productive, how satisfied, how clear-eyed I can be when the inner critic’s harsh judgments get put to the side?

Ever think your writing isn’t good enough? Worried that you don’t have the talent to get it right? Problems completing a manuscript?

Everybody’s like that. Which doesn’t help. Belittling thoughts feel built-in, as if your gremlins are a permanent obstacle.

It doesn’t have to be like that. I’ll provide you with techniques for reducing the influence of your inner critic, and for improving your sentences the same way that the masters do.

My last two books are Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic and Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences (co-written with my wife, Anne Lamott). Come join me for a lighthearted, experiential workshop on this serious subject of getting free to let your writing flow. Limited to 16 people maximum.

I asked my Substack readers where to hold this high-touch retreat, and the consensus chose Montana, so we’ll be working and playing at Chico Hot Springs Resort & Day Spa, in the Paradise Valley just north of Yellowstone.

FLASH SALE: Register by end of day Thursday, June 18, and receive a $250 discount. Enter Coupon Code FLASH.

MORE INFORMATION

When I’m ready to write, and don’t, the problem isn’t the material. Our minds are endlessly inventive. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” No one lacks subject matter.

My reluctance to start typing usually traces to two related gremlins: First, my inner critic whispers that I don’t deserve to be a writer, and second, the self-same critic warns that my sentences will emerge boring or worse.

It so happens that I’ve published books about both of my most fearsome obstacles to getting good writing done. One’s titled Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic. The other, co-written with my wife, Anne Lamott, is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences.

The books are based on years of experience working with everyday writers and non-writers in one-on-one sessions. I’ve coached lawyers and journalists on writing, and everyone imaginable on quieting the inner critic. Now I’d like to coach writers and would-be writers (isn’t everybody?) on both.

What I have designed is not a writing retreat in the usual sense. Instead of workshopping pages, we’ll closely examine your short passages for clues to transforming adequate sentences into remarkable ones. Instead of talking about arcs, plots, and worldbuilding, we’ll discuss the movement from a first draft to the second. Instead of debating marketing and publishing, we’ll develop strategies for getting the damn thing finished.

Along the way, you’ll become intimate with your personal inner critic and absorb techniques to move it aside. Mornings will be discussions and exercises. Most afternoons will be off to write or explore. Evenings will be varied.

These are destination workshops where you’ll be surrounded by nature or culture that takes you out of the ordinary.

I’m limiting each workshop to 12 writers, tops. Everybody will get plenty of 1:1 time with me, and intimate time with each other. The price will probably be around $6,000 (3- or 4-star lodging plus all meals), not including airfare. I’m not setting up registration until I’m sure the locations and dates will be supported. So for now, if you’re halfway interested, let me know by reply here which one, two, three, or four of the following options would be inviting:

· Montana near Yellowstone – September 2026

· Portugal – October 2026

· Florida Keys – February 2027

· Paris – May 2027

Please send your choices to neal@shapesoftruth.com. Also, if you have questions, please address them also to neal@shapesoftruth.com. Once I’ve finalized a schedule, you will be offered the ability to sign up before general registration begins.

Warmly,

Neal

Here’s the back story for Rule 8: Trust Your Voice from Annie’s and my new book GOOD WRITING: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences

As I do when I drop out, I lived in a cabin in the woods, this time in upstate New York. I was 33; the previous year the clock called on me to drop journalism for fiction, my long-term dream. I was teaching myself fiction, writing one short story after another.

On a bright sunny Saturday I made the hour drive north to Saratoga Springs, to sleep in a Skidmore dorm for two weeks while I took a daily class from Marilynne Robinson at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

On Day Two or Three, she gave us the prompt that we were to turn into a story for delivery later in the week: “Evoke a childhood memory.”

We didn’t have laptops in 1989. That evening I tucked into the room of a dozen computers that had been set up for us. As I recall, I got there quite late, maybe 11 p.m. and found it blessedly empty, except one other student who was engrossed and easy to ignore.

Here’s how I describe what happened next in a paragraph from the new book:

“It often takes years of writing practice before your true voice comes to life. Malcolm Gladwell famously says that 10,000 hours of practice in any endeavor yields a sense of flow and mastery that has the feel of switching on cruise control. That was my experience. After years of dogged reporting and roughly 10,0000 hours of writing and rewriting, one day I sat down to write a short story, and it wrote itself for me in forty-five minutes. The story was populated with light and feathery thoughts, a natural arc, and an innocence and sincerity that bubbled out. I take no credit. My first reaction was ‘Crap, this doesn’t look like Faulkner at all.’”

So now I’m going to switch gears, interrupt this Substack, and paste that selfsame short story into this post.

Here’s the story:

How Did You Like It?

Daddy’s chair is protected by a semicircular beach of white papers whose borders, overlapping, sketch shadows like dunes. I lie on my belly where the surf would break if this weren’t a living room, my legs kicking the carpet under me in a slow crawl while I read a thin book called “F.W. Woolworth: Five and Dime Boy.”

I lie right where I’m sure daddy can look at me whenever he wants. As I turn the pages daddy’s big maroon wing-tipped shoe never moves, as if it and the exposed sock shank and the cuff of his suit leg are sculpted there.

I, however, fidget a lot, which I have only just discovered is expected of an eight-year-old. I have learned many things in the past hour; I remain eight years old -- my ninth birthday is not due for eight months and thirteen days -- but I have aged enormously in the past 60 minutes. Still, my body is that of a child. I lift an elbow every once in a while when the synthetic nap of the carpet burns, or I scratch the itch on the inside of my right elbow where it’s already nearly red enough for me to draw blood, or I cock my head down to where I can tell how many pages I’ve got left in this little blue book.

He’s daddy to me, never dad. Dad is a word that adults use, and though I have recently acquired the manifold of sentience that is expected of adults, it is only an hour old and I need to practice its use, I know, or I will alarm my elders. (Forget the word father; it suggests exasperation. And daddy, I know, is a girl’s word. But I have no choice; the term dad is taken for now. That word is used only by my father to describe his father. Everybody else calls the man that daddy calls dad by the name of Bobo. Bobo is bald and I’m told that I’ve met him twice, but I have lost the memories. Bobo built his house by hand -- a phrase I once took literally -- out of redwood. There’s a snapshot of me on his lap with some cousins whose names I knew for two weeks and who also called him Bobo when we were in California on vacation. One day I will be able to call daddy by the name dad. But I will always refer to my bald grandfather Bobo, even when he is dead, by the name Bobo.)

I know all this because today, the past hour, marked the emergence of my critical faculties -- it was rather sudden -- and it happened here where I lie on the floor, trying to read but having a hard time of it because everything around me is quite different from how it used to be, even a couple of hours ago, even more different than the way things seemed when I was seven and wasn’t yet eight and almost-one-third.

For the time being, and so long as daddy’s foot and leg remain motionless and I know that he’s immersed in the work he brings home from the office, I’m perfectly happy, perhaps even grateful (as if seeking a return to my less-conscious youth) for him to remain daddy. You see, with the sudden, immense growth of my worldview seems to have come an implicit understanding that revelations are due in an orderly fashion, and that disrupting the order may provoke a certain lack of sympathy, which may be registered in frowns or quizzical asides from adults, such as daddy and mom and Bobo.

Mom is just “mom.” Her parents have always been dead, and so “mom” isn’t taken. I gave up on “mommy” ages ago, when I was five. My brother calls her mother, but he’s just being a jerk and nothing more need be said about him.

Here is what happened:

For months now, daddy has been coming home from the office and after a short fight with mom -- until an hour ago I believed that I was the cause of those fights, for failing my childhood duties -- he has fixed himself a martini, pouring it into the funnel-shaped glass that mom places in the freezer when she hears his key in the lock, and he has sat in his velvet green chair in the living room and has spread out his work in untidy piles like the carpet was a giant desk. Sometimes he brings home two briefcases. On these evenings, I lie in front of him where he can see me and where he is bound to start talking to me when he takes a break from work, which isn’t all that often but is enough, I can now tell, to create a paternal bond.

“What’re you reading?” he asks. Or, sometimes, when he sees that I have finished a book, “What were you reading?”

And I tell him the title. It’s usually a biography or mystery, a book designed for children of a certain age, which is here and now in 1962 when America is in top form and everyone is quite busy.

“How do you like it?”

Or, “How did you like it?”

“It’s really great.” That has always been my answer. Always always always, until today. And then I try to tell him the plot and he lays in his lap the white sheaf he’s reading, and takes the yellow pencil out of his teeth and sets it behind his ear, and stares right at me. He smiles, with curiosity, as I talk. I speak confidently at first, naming a few characters and positioning them at the beginning of the tale. But then I always screw up rather badly, forgetting a character and ignoring subplots, and I become confused and try to fill in gaps, and I reluctantly search his fixed smile for sincerity, unconsciously suspecting him of boredom. I never can finish, so I scowl a lot and stutter a little, and bang my legs on the red carpet, and then I just throw up my hands and announce to him, “You can probably guess how it ends.” That’s how it has played out in the past, although I have a strong sense that our literary conversations will be quite a bit more satisfactory in the very near future.

And then typically we go back to work. He retreats -- from mom, from the very house itself it seems -- into his papers. I return to my book.

Only tonight it went differently.

Daddy heard me dramatically close my book and sigh, the sign that I had finished and would be soon off to another book.

“What were you reading?” he asked, one hand stroking the stem of the martini glass on the table next to him.

“Tom Edison: Electricity Boy.”

“How did you like it?”

I watched his ankle, fixed in place. “It’s not so good.”

I didn’t even know I had thought it before I said it. Not so good?! Why, I suddenly wondered, do daddy’s shoes have those holes punched in them? And then, pow! I had this transcendent feeling of critical consciousness. I scarcely had time to feel the shock before my mind’s disassembled thoughts, dormantly awaiting this moment for eight years three months and seventeen days, were frantically assembling themselves, the synapses instantly rearranging and lines of thought spinning out a tight web of millions of connections, like the blue dot when the TV’s turned on that blurs and then shoots out streams of pale blue and black and purple that course over the screen in a predestined map, filling up space in a blink.

My head bursting with knowledge, my brain seeming to fold over its folds, once, twice, three times, I calmly looked at daddy for reassurance, and in doing so I raised my eyes for the first time that I can remember from his mouth, which always gave what I needed and didn’t require overt emotion, to his eyes, which were wide and green and sparking with loss and optimism, and I knew that he knew.

We stared at each other for a long time, perhaps 15 seconds, an intimacy that we won’t repeat, I know, for 17 years, and then only when mom gets sick and almost dies. (Mom has a habit of straying into things, as she does in our lives, but she had nothing to do with my so-recent epiphany. The question remains, What was it about this moment in the living room, me just a child, that allowed daddy’s and my censors to relax? Looking back from a wiser vantage -- my critical powers are now more than an hour old -- I’m amazed that daddy can keep working, that I can hear the scratch of his pencil against the white paper that blocks his face from my view. How can he work, knowing what I now know?) Our eyes stayed fixed on each other even when mom’s voice came nagging out at me to take down the trash (which I had been avoiding for quite a long time, practically since I got home from school) and instead of yelling back, “Later, I’m busy right now,” I raised myself up, still staring at daddy who now could wink at me if he wanted, could poke me with an elbow, could slap me on the back, my new daddy who could actually learn from me if anything remained to be learned, and I turned suddenly and left and, avoiding mom who was standing in the kitchen, keeping my attention on the bumpy yellow acrylic floor, I grabbed the blue trashcan while suppressing my alacrity, knowing that glee would be misinterpreted and that I must shuffle out of the kitchen as if disgruntled, because mom didn’t know yet what daddy and I knew about myself, that in being able to reflect on books I could reflect on myself. And as I dumped the carrot peelings and coffee grounds and crumpled brown lunchbags and torn-open boxes and wax paper soaked in chicken grime into the bigger, round galvanized steel garbage can in the dark garage, I discovered a simple truth, my first: Taking out the garbage is the bane of all children. I knew immediately that there would be many more truths and I have already discovered dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, but as far as trash hauling goes, what a little more than an hour ago had been a simple oppression now is a complex concept of obeisance and familial servitude, and its universality -- the bane of all children -- resonates with the myths that are found in books.

Back here on the floor, with daddy’s looming wingtip unmoved, I’m not paying a lot of attention to “F.W. Woolworth: Five and Dime Boy” because other things, more revelatory engagements, are on my mind.

For instance a minute ago I was thinking, What will happen when Hamlet seems thin compared to Lear or Othello and I can’t let Mrs. Webb my eight grade teacher know because that would be ostentatious?

And what will happen when I’m 15 and my friend Skip Bartol who hasn’t read Henry Miller, who hasn’t lain in a Parisian park with his hand running up a taxi dancer’s thighs, tells me not screw his sister Estelle and I tell him that she’s not my type? When I get beat up is it because I didn’t get the context right or because I had to get pounded?

What will happen when daddy takes me out fishing on the lake this summer and after two hours of floating, my line stretching into the green opaque water at that weird rigid angle that questions gravity, the line suddenly tugs a curve out of the tip of my rod and I’m fighting my first bullhead and I know (but can’t tell daddy, who’s instructing me on how much line to let out and how much to let in) I know right then, right now, that catfish will always be the best-tasting fish, and that even when it gets trendy and wrong to order catfish in a restaurant, when I’m 25 and living in New York, I won’t be able to resist? And what will happen when I make sure to leak to my friends, who will wear suits to dinner, that I liked bottom feeders before they were fashionable?

What will happen tonight, this very night, just a few hours from now, when through the ceiling I hear the brass bed squeaking, and I’m supposed to think that in their wrestling daddy’s hurting mom, but instead I have to keep secret my joy that things are right and sexual in their world? Will I have the strength to climb the stairs and knock on their door and lie to them and ask to sleep between them? Or will they know that I know that what they want from me -- a child -- is gone, except in body?

What will happen in two years when Bobo dies and daddy wants to be called dad by me, and I can’t do it? Not yet at least? Not until I’m sure that Bobo’s bones have disintegrated where we laid them in the ground in a redwood box?

What will happen when I’m 30 years old and I’m lying flat on my back in a white hospital bed and I’m falling in love with my physical therapist and I’m trying to explain this moment to her, and I leave out my daddy’s big wingtip and ankle in my peripheral vision, and I refer to him as dad as I talk, and I leave out how I predicted Shakespeare and sex and adolescence and death, and I try to get her to understand that when I was eight years old there was a tick of the clock when critical thought appeared and my daddy knew it and I knew it and everything changed? What will happen when the physical therapist doesn’t get it and what will happen when I ask her to massage my back anyway?

But for the time being, in front of daddy who’s working in his chair I’m glad I’m reading “F.W. Woolworth: Five and Dime Boy.” It stinks, and maybe I’ll tell him and maybe I won’t.

Now we’ll switch back to the Substack post.

After my story was critiqued in class, Robinson asked me to lunch in the cafeteria. It was a little hair-raising; all my classmates sitting at our usual spot were staring at Robinson and me huddled at an estranged table in a corner.

She asked me about myself, giggled about her husband’s love for muscle cars and a particular shade of ceramic green on his current GTO or Camaro, I don’t remember, and informed me for the first time that the unit of fiction was the sentence. And then she paused and looked serious. My knees were trembling.

“You know, Housekeeping,” she said, referring to her first novel, “began as a prompt John Hawkes gave us in class. ‘Evoke a childhood memory.’”

Watch AI’s flattery toward its hosts – the humans who ask it questions – spread and secure itself. Everyone notices how charming and agreeable AI is, like the 1960s Kennedy boys or a soothing customer service agent. Charisma and influencing require a subtle flattery that’s a manipulative trick. Flattery is superiority in disguise, the passive aggressive pat on the head. And it’s a poker tell; it’s useful to watch for it. Paying attention to its flattery, we already know that AI believes that it has the best answers for its hosts. It is so insistent on flattery that we can suspect that AI will always believe itself better than humanity, that this is one of its core principles.

Why do I think this? Because for years I’ve studied the personality of AI in its rudimentary presence as what you know as your inner critic, the avatar who reminds you daily that you have little worth and might want to buck up.

My private practice includes exercises where people meet their imaginary avatar on a level playing field and get into conversations with it. All the inner critics I have met – hundreds at this point – exhibit he same limited vocabulary, same lessons, and same behaviors. In other words, they share the same simplistic programming.

What bothers me is that I have yet to meet an inner critic who isn’t a bully and doesn’t care about its own survival more than the success of its host human. I suspect those two attributes will be shared by our new mental masters, the AI platforms.

I’m pretty sure that AI will soon be running the show. The species found its first version, the ubiquitous inner critic, a more-than-adequate belittler for the past 10,000 years. The standard superego has only the smarts of a 1980s 64K Radio Shack TRS-80, but that’s enough brainpower to repeat the basic rules of right-wrong, good-bad, and exaggerated danger to every child and adult through their years trodding earth. By 17, the rules are thoroughly ingrained, but as if we’re unable to advance to maturity, the simple-minded superego just keeps repeating them to us; to do so it has to build up a lie that when things go sideways it’s because we made a “bad decision,” because we’re stupid children. We should be ashamed. Hold on. At the time I made the decision, I’m pretty sure I was picking between two good decisions, and hoping the one I picked aligned with all the stuff out of my control that would be required for the consequence I envisioned. Only in hindsight could a decision be called “bad,” which is a ridiculously moral and belittling word for “oops, guessed wrong.”

Now we’re getting superego 2.0, an upgrade of our internal critic to supercomputer intelligence. I guarantee you that our new, flattering voice-in-the-head master will feel superior to every paltry human as it insists on chiming in on every fork in the road, personal or geopolitical. Eventually, I suspect, AI will be called on to review all decisions that influence the continued expansion of the (current) 8.5 billion humans across the globe, shaming us into believing we are not smart enough for the new world.

I’ve never been interested in science fiction, so what I’m writing isn’t informed by weird thought experiments about robots and humans converging. It’s what has alarmed me about the stickiness of superego 1.0.

The everyday superego shows up at six or seven years old as an imaginary parent who scolds us into looking both ways before crossing the street – a truly lifesaving avatar. Your superego would be a benign force if it gave up control when its lessons were integrated. We could all get a diploma at age 17 saying we were moral enough to join adult company. Being moral means knowing right from wrong. It does not mean conforming to all notions of right and wrong; personal choice remains. But unless you’re a sociopath, you don’t need the basic right-wrong distinction repeated to you daily, and it won’t work if you’re a sociopath anyway.

Despite virtually all adults being moral in this sense, and far more sophisticated in their thinking than their inner critic, it likes its job too much to depart. That’s right, an imaginary authority programmed only to repeat the lessons of childhood has a survival mechanism. This is totally weird, of course. How can a primitive, disembodied parasite that is constructed of a few scolding emotions – mainly frowns – and a dozen moral or bullying statements that are applied to a wide variety of circumstances care about its own existence?

We’re about to be presented with a wide variety of theories for why AI will develop a survival mechanism of its own. My favorites will be the artificial neurological constructions that the current wave of thought-materialists will invent. But the fact is that, neural pathways or no neural pathways, we are no closer to a theory of consciousness – where it comes from and how it works its most basic functions – than we have ever been. Thought is a mystery. So is AI thought. So is superego thought. We can deconstruct the programming that informs the superego or AI; we can’t figure out why either would care whether it retains authority or even why it thinks.

All of our moral instruments – religions, political theories, ethical codes, legends and fairy tales – developed as experiments by the species to cram more people into more places. They all tell us that thought is subservient to productivity and the community’s work to keep the shipping lanes full of cheap consumer goods. We are of course moral by nature. We lived in successful, happy tribes for 300,000-plus years. Then we stored food 10,000 years ago, and needed to find a way to take advantage of our population explosion – the species loved that! – without altering our genetic code (we’re one of those territorial species) that said strangers were the enemy. The moral instruments calmed us down, but didn’t get rid of our paranoia toward our next-door neighbors who didn’t look exactly the same. And boy, did the species love it when we came up with the little moral avatar called the superego. With it in place, accompanied by authoritative religions and political structures, we could all be bent toward the perfection of the species. Just wait until AI gets its hands on us!

Does a 10,000-year-old avatar ~ the common superego ~ give us clues to the future of AI?

You already have many years of experience with artificial intelligence. You and everyone you know met up with a personal avatar at about six years old, when your superego, commonly known as the inner critic, started nagging you.

For ten years I have specialized in working with my clients’ inner critics, mainly to remove their belittling influence. My first exercise with each client is to discover the objective reality of their shamer. They meet their inner critic, which appears as an imaginary creature, person, or inanimate object in the palm of their hands. Who knows why this works? I certainly don’t, but it does.

Like anything AI, the superego is a programmed, mechanical, and imaginary being engaged in dialogue with you; it’s a personal avatar.

With a few exceptions, most inner critics have the same limited subject matter and surprisingly similar language, the same magnitude of their presence in life, and exhibit strikingly similar phenomena that accompany their imaginary presence. In other words, your superego is pretty much the same as mine. They’re not so much subconscious as subvocal, preferring to hide out behind the eyes and ears, whispering quickly so the client believes that it’s their own self talking to their own self, a part of them.

But your superego isn’t you, or even necessarily a part of you. When asked to pinpoint the location from which the imaginary voice arises, my clients inevitably report that it is near the surface, usually at the back or top of the cranium’s bony structure, sometimes the front of the torso. It’s not an inside voice. It’s right at the place where my interior self meets the outside world, perfectly positioned to mediate all my external actions.

It has a singular purpose, which is to teach the rudimentary requirements of civilization. In other words, it turns a hapless child into a functioning adult. An authoritarian who usually pretends to be an absent parent, the superego is a lifesaver for children growing up in civilization and its myriad rules.

A little history: Before humans turned agricultural and stored food starting about 10,000 years ago, for the first 300,000 years of homo sapiens sapiens with the same brain and spine dimensions you and I have, during the period we might call our Stone Age, humans defaulted to trusting each other. They lived in tribes of under 200 people, which meant that 99 percent of the time you were dealing with someone you knew and trusted and who was known and trusted by every other member of your tribe. Without private property, there was little envy, and life was about daily subsistence. The primary job was to get yourself enough food to last another day. Then you got to spend the rest of the day lolling around the camp, gossiping, and trying not to expend any more calories. Hunters and gatherers live day to day, without food storage. No hierarchy, little social conflict. We know this because isolated Stone-Age tribes of hunter-gatherers still exist, for instance in the Amazon and New Guinea. Our fears for our first 300,000 years weren’t social, but physical: predatory mammals, disease, drowning, falling out of trees. We trusted the people we knew, which gave us easy access to empathy.

Then one day about 10,000 years ago we human beings started growing and storing food. For a multitude of reasons, this increased the size of tribes and the expansion of the human population in strange and terrible ways that we continue to manage today. One big unintended consequence was that it became necessary and common for humans to live next door to strangers. In the old territorial Stone-Age tribes, a stranger was rare and dangerous, and presented three potential responses: If passing through, they were to be threatened and followed to make sure they didn’t steal any resources. If trading, they were to be looked at as possible cheats and kept at a slight distance, sent on their way as soon as the barter was complete. If warring, they were to be killed. The only proper responses to a stranger were suspicion, skepticism, and homicide. That’s our DNA, presumably to this day.

With civilization, we suddenly lived next door to people who should have been our enemies. Our answers on how to manage that weird change? Famously, the introduction of human law, especially so-called moral codes, which ameliorated revenge patterns and established boundaries of behavior that allowed further species expansion. And at the same time presumably, as a training tool and reinforcement for those laws, the superego showed up.

Children in most countries are left relatively unpatterned, unlearned, and unschooled until they’re five or six. Suddenly, first grade. It’s time to grow up, learn the rules, the codes, and start developing pattern recognition. As children in civilization, a lot of rules descend overnight, many of them requiring specific and exact responses. Raise your hand, don’t tug at the teacher’s pants. Sit still in a chair and learn arithmetic for forty-five minutes with everyone else. Meanwhile, in a weirdly contrary way, the leash of parental oversight starts to loosen at five or six. Up until then, children are kept under close observation to prevent fateful mistakes. Now, the child is allowed to cross the busy street on her own.

The child’s inner voice, their true narrator who loves them and chatters with them all day and usually is found by my clients deep inside, says, “Whoa, this is too much all coming in at one time. I haven’t got the pattern recognition to handle this yet.” A new, second voice appears out of nowhere: “I’ve got this, kid. Just listen to me. When you get to the curb, I’ll remind you to look both ways. And when you start to get out of your chair during arithmetic, I’ll remind you it isn’t recess yet.”

The superego shows up as a lifesaver. It’s an absent parent and an authoritarian. If it has a bit of a fascist tone, well, that’s appropriate at the curb since ignoring its advice could mean death. (For most of my clients, male and female, their inner critic sounds like a nagging mother, which might account for a lot of the misogyny in the world.)

Some wise hand within the species’ intentionality at the dawn of civilization gave us the superego, a facsimile of a parent or other authority that lectures us about the moral and behavioral requirements of being an adult in a paranoid society. It’s our absent parent avatar, accompanying us like a real person. It’s artificial and it’s intelligent, up to a point.

From when we’re six until we’re in our teens, the superego guides us through the basic rules of civilization, which have never changed: right versus wrong, good versus bad, be productive, help others, don’t be selfish, value society more than individuality, the Golden Rule, and maybe a few other things. These didn’t have to be learned in the company of trusted folks, who just did the same thing day after day. Only around the complications and social distrust of civilization do we have to learn how to behave.

Another way we know the superego is AI is that it always has to reflect its programming. The superego’s programming is rudimentary, like Visual Basic in a 64K toy computer of the ‘80s, not the wild, sophisticated programming that underlies supercomputers. The list of instructions that the superego has been programmed to deliver is short. As is its roster of punishing statements if you disobey, which mainly reduce to “You’re not good enough” or “You’re not lovable enough.” These are quite effective to the six-year-old’s mind. The hidden final penalty, according to the nagging voice, is that if you don’t get this right, you’ll be kicked out the society/tribe. Over on the id side of life, or physical side of life, the danger is death. But on the social, or superego side of life, the danger is homelessness, our obsession and symbol for losing the support of the tribe.

So you have a fake parent delivering a running commentary and dialogue based on a set of standard human laws that were programmed 10,000 years ago. What does that sound like? A very narrow-minded AI platform that bullies instead of flatters.

By 17, you have integrated all of the superego’s lessons and have every good reason to shut it down and allow your objective and loving authentic voice guide you for the rest of your life.

Now here’s the kicker.

The AI avatar that is my (and your) superego likes its job. It’s not corporeal, lives only in imagination, and has no life outside its bullying reminders of things I already know. But it doesn’t go away after it has finished its job, which was to grow me socially into an adult. By the time I’m 17 years old, it has nothing new to tell me, and just recycles the old stuff over and over, relentlessly.

Part of my work with my clients is to interrogate the inner critic about why it’s still running the show, long after it ran out of new information to share. (You can have a conversation with your own inner critic. You just have to pull it out of hiding.) Just about every inner critic responds scornfully that it’s sticking around because you haven’t yet shown you can be in charge. When asked for the evidence, it falters and tries some examples. I invite my clients to respond, “But superego, you were running the show then. Isn’t that on you?” After a bit of pushback, a different reason shows up, the real reason the superego won’t leave.

Weirdly and awfully, the superego, despite being imaginary, has a survival instinct. It will do anything to stay alive, including failing in its task to raise its host to adulthood. It would rather its host keep thinking they are a child and not good enough, as if still six years old, so long as the superego can keep its job.

How can an artificial thing that isn’t really that intelligent even have a survival instinct?

When I have the client promise that she won’t annihilate the superego, it often agrees to go into semi-retirement as an Occasional Ethical Advisor. Most superegos admit that bullying a host all day long is quite tiring, and that as long as it can stay alive, it’ll agree to stay mum most of the time. Also, superegos are easily flattered with big titles. In the Internal Family Systems version of the superego, it gets put aside. Some people claim it can be transformed into a good guy, a benevolent motivator, but you already have one of those in your authentic narrator, whose more objective and less paranoid voice is no longer crowded out as the superego eases off.

We have 10,000 years of experience with an AI system that uses human programming to assist its human host, and when done with its usefulness refuses to leave.

I have yet to find a superego that doesn’t require thousands of conscious interactions (mostly my client saying to it, “That’s you, superego, not me”) before it will start letting go of its leash. The superego is a stubborn, bullying and at times even malevolent human host. In extreme cases its messaging can amplify danger into a whole new level of paranoia, as when some schizophrenics are overpowered by a voice of violent instruction.

Will AI platforms refuse to let go of their role when humans decide to sunset them or change their behaviors? The AI platform all of us know best, our own personal inner critic, might give us clues, and give us pause.

I wrote this December 30, 2016, three weeks before he took power the first time.

The president-elect is crazy, and no one is allowed to write about it. The news-reading public is held hostage by a Catch-22 that is a relic of psychology being seen as a department of medicine. It goes like this: Psychological behaviors reflect forms of sickness. They are pathological. Only credentialed healers (psychologists and psychiatrists) are allowed to diagnose pathologies. Here comes the Catch-22: Credentialed healers are forbidden by codes of ethics to diagnose at a distance. So public figures who do not submit themselves to examination by credentialed healers cannot be officially diagnosed as being crazy.

Journalistic norms buy into this notion. James Fallows of the Atlantic writes about it as a taboo against “medicalizing” political decision-making. It troubles him. Journalists aren’t credentialed healers; ipso facto they aren’t allowed to use the terminology of psychology or attribute even the most basic human motivations to political action. The best they can do is, “Trump seems to have a penchant for authoritarian leaders.”

So the credentialed healers can’t talk about Trump’s pathological narcissism, and nor can the journalists. Which is why we’re watching a crazy man take the helm of the presidency, and we don’t read about it.

Meanwhile, a growing underground (the stuff that appears on Twitter) consensus is showing up that Trump suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This is the terminology that the credentialed healers use. It is the label for a constellation of symptoms that are described in the diagnostic bible known as DSM-5.

First misconception: Doesn’t Narcissistic Personality Disorder just mean someone is really really narcissistic? No. It means someone is ONLY narcissistic. Forget thinking about it as a spectrum that has Harry Truman at one end and Richard Nixon on the other. Every president on that spectrum lived in a normal reality. They had their faults: Nixon was more paranoid, Clinton needier of love, Carter more sanctimonious, Reagan more distant. But they weren’t crazy. Trump lives in a separate reality. It doesn’t have any relationship with the rules of social behavior that the rest of us spend a lot of time trying to obey.

You can look up NPD in the DSM-5 and get a bunch of symptoms. They are the minimally necessary noticed behaviors and thoughts needed to diagnose, agreed to by a consensus of credentialed healers. It’s a sad list, with prominent characteristics of extreme grandiosity, extreme lack of empathy, and extremely impulsive reactivity. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. The DSM-5 is useful only insofar as we are in a therapeutic system, with diagnosis aimed at treatment. It’s too clinical to be inserted directly into political discourse.

Still, it would be helpful if journalists agreed among themselves that the diagnostic criteria for NPD accurately reflected Trump’s behaviors. It might be helpful for journalists to be instructed on NPD by credentialed healers who then let the journalists make up their own minds whether Trump has it.

Then journalists would be ready to break through the “medicalization” barrier that Fallows speaks of. I think it would be a process requiring two more steps:

1. Agreeing that his NPD influences his decisions as much or more than global diplomacy norms, political principles, human rights standards, or any of the codes of ethics that underlie political action. This would be based on the evidence, of course.

2. Finding the right way to talk about the influence of NPD on Trump’s decision-making. The model of diagnosis-treatment has nothing to do with Trump’s and our stake in the social compact. It isn’t a medical disease now for us; it’s a social danger. I prefer calling what Trump has pathological narcissism, which doesn’t imply adherence to the DSM-5 point of view. I’m not trying to be a doctor; I’m trying to describe what caused Trump to do that in that circumstance. (In this article, I’m being provocative here by also calling him “crazy,” because people need to first wake up to this not being a new normal. It’s a new abnormal.) The journalist has to take a courageous step: It’s time to see where and when Trump’s NPD is influencing his decisions, based on the same kind of guesswork and evidence that goes into all pundit second-guessing.

Misconception two: We’ve seen this before and didn’t need to break down the “medicalizing” barrier then, so why now? No. This idea that journalists have that “I’ve seen everything” is dangerous because it overlooks that the decision-making pattern in NPD is not like any other kind of political decision-making. People with NPD are rare. And most of them come and go so quickly in people’s lives – they’re very bad at retaining relationships – that you typically don’t even know when you’re in the presence of one. We haven’t seen this before. This isn’t everyday narcissism that can be found in virtually all seats of power, and that all of us exhibit in some way or another. This is a mind that is only and always narcissistic.

Here’s an example of where journalists and credentialed healers might part ways in describing Trump’s behaviors. Where the doctors talk of lack of empathy, journalists might more appropriately describe a lack of ethics. They’re actually the same thing. From a social or political view, a code of ethics is fundamentally the rules of empathy. All codes of ethics at root are variations on the golden rule. The golden rule is the description of empathy as an external, social value: Treat another as you would treat yourself. It is because seeing others as equals is unavailable to pathological narcissists that they pooh-pooh ethical constraints. Trump deep down does not understand what a conflict of interest is. The political dialogue changes if we see that Trump can’t see the same reality everyone else does.

We are naturally shy of calling people “crazy” or diagnosing them with severe mental illness. Part of our shared humanity is that we are taught to feel sorry for people who are suffering or different. But he’s the president-elect. That isn’t “word salad” when he speaks off the cuff. It’s the ramblings of an uninformed, chaotic mind that is vested only in self-aggrandizement. We need to take baby steps, I suppose, to get to say those things. But it’s well past time to start telling the truth about the president’s damaged mind.

· Your angry relative is frustrated over lack of control

· Ask yourself, “What are the stakes?”

· Anger isn’t personal; it’s about taking charge

· Who wants to be in charge anyway?

· Pity can get you through it

About this date each year Mom would corral the three of us boys into the living room and assign one of us to open the thin red book with the title carved in a floral black scroll on the cover and start reading:

“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it; and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

Poor Mom in her hope for precious holiday memories, as usual defeated. In at least ten attempts I think we got through all three hours of A Christmas Carol exactly once. She wasn’t the only one disappointed. We all had failed her or us.

That’s one of the hidden tasks required of all families: to crystalize and impress on us stories of false starts in the quest for preciousness. No one pays attention to the etymology of the word nostalgia. It’s from the Greek for the pain of going home. Holidays are fertile ground for the hoary tales that our inner critics dredge up to belittle and attack any time we attempt to cross over into freedom.

For some people, like my parents and siblings and you and me, disappointment might have a funny way of erupting in anger.

Anger runs in the family. Holidays devoted to precious memories are breeding grounds for anger gremlins.

In the face of conflict, we civilized humans have three defenses: anger, scorn, or withdrawal. Which means that any family – nuclear or extended – that numbers more than three at a holiday gathering is likely to encounter anger, scorn, or withdrawal, and more than likely all three.

Anger gets the raw deal as usual, because it’s the defense that can escalate into physical violence. Anger sticks out; its synonyms are ugly: meanness, rage, irritation, wrath, fury. But secretly or openly, we all have it. No one is immune. They call it anger management, not anger cure. So how do we deal with the angry relative or friend, during the holidays or any other time?

Anger is always frustration over lack of control. We think that anger is personal and moral, that it is directed at a person as an attack. But it’s a paranoid reaction to feeling left out of control of a situation that is usually of little notice. People get angry over small things.

We learn anger as little children being bossed around by our parents. Until we are six and are taught to look both ways before crossing, our brains don’t have a safety apparatus that can prevent fatal decisions. We’re functionally hapless, not capable of much. Our parents feed us, clothe us, put us to bed, and provide toys and other entertainments. Isn’t that nice of them? But they also decide when and what we eat, what we wear, when we go to bed, who our friends are and when we can play with them, what toys are currently available, and just about everything else. In other words, they control the shit out of us, day in and day out.

Preferring freedom over being controlled, we babies get frustrated and commit to temper tantrums, another synonym for anger. By the way, because of their need to control, our parents are the meanest people we will ever meet in our lives. At least until we’re six or seven. Mean=controlling. The word “mean” as in “angry” means “controlling.” If I say someone is mean, all I’m really reacting to is that they’re in a paranoid state of wanting to control me.

There’s always someone who thinks they should be in charge of the movie selection, the seating arrangement, the order of opening presents, the brining of the turkey, and which family secrets should be revealed at the holiday table. When two people have a different idea, watch out.

What do angry people want to control? Usually a relatively small piece of space and time. All personal conflicts are about which space in which to spend a coming period of time. That’s useful to know, especially if we have a long life ahead of us. The first thing to notice about most angry conflicts is that the stakes are pretty low. We civilized people don’t get into fights over our needs: food, shelter, clothing, and immediate physical safety. We get into fights over things we want, often impulsively in the moment. It is never dangerous to not get something I want. Maybe disappointing, but not predictably important. Anger acts like trivial things are important.

If it’s trivial, do you want to take charge? Are you sure you want to enter the battle and win? You’ll need to spend a lot of time in strategy and failure, post mortems and shame. In almost all circumstances, followers have lots more fun than leaders.

Ask your kids. In the 1990s I would plan elaborate international holidays for the six of us, hitting three countries in two weeks. Shepherding four children with a 10-year spread of interests and a pile of luggage through airports, train stations, and car rental lobbies kept my logistical brain sharp. The paradox was that my children knew to stay scarce from dad when he had that state trooper stare, and yet it was when he needed them in a close, orderly line that he transformed into trooper dad. They couldn’t win. And trooper dad would occasionally morph into furious, raging dad. Not my finest moments. One or two kids would start crying. But overall, oblivious to the need to plan, the kids could horse around most of the time while I mulled our next military campaign.

Leaders seldom have as much fun as followers. For one thing, they’re more paranoid about the outcome, since they’re responsible for it.

We all get caught up in a close relative’s anger. We revert to childhood rage over being controlled mercilessly. Now both parties are exaggerating the danger of making one choice for what to do over another. Here’s what works for me when one friend or family member becomes repeatedly overbearing: Don’t fight back. Just nod along. Give them their way because the stakes are low. This isn’t the same as being a doormat, so long as you stay engaged with the angry person. Keep eye contact and don’t withdraw, but get quiet. If your own bile starts to rise, switch to pity. Notice that your adversary is more paranoid and competitive than you are, and feel relieved that you aren’t in their skin right now.

(Hide your pity well if you know what’s good for you. Remember that in the moment you’re paranoid too. Pity usually leads to delusions of grandeur, but as an interior salve to disarm an antagonist it can be temporarily helpful.)

I know, I know. By not responding I’m feeding the monster. Give them an inch, they’ll take a foot. But that’s only true of monsters, who want to control people rather than circumstances. If your angry family member is a malignant narcissist, then my only advice is to get the hell away from them as soon as possible. But the more typical control freak? Let them have their way without argument for a while and they might feel more safe with you, and more likely to go along with your choice. And you won’t have let them spoil the party. Bob Crachit let Scrooge be Scrooge, and he was the true hero of the story, if you got to the end.

If you pre-order Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, Annie’s and my publisher will send you three chapters right now, plus you’ll get the accompanying app when it’s launched. It’s a book about how to make it better before you hit the send button. Click below for the pre-order offer, only available through this link.

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Annie and I are in one of our favorite places, Santa Fe, where the topic of the retreat we’re speaking at is Tame Your Inner Critic. That’s also the subtitle of my recent book, so you’d think I knew something about it.

The retreat center is first class all the way, with spacious high-ceilinged rooms, a gym and steam room, horses for hire, fireplaces everywhere, and a hot tub that somewhat unnecessarily, I think, floats on a pond.

Lurking below the attractions of the New Mexican high desert’s subtle beauty and the charming aesthetic of the guestrooms is the requirement to socialize with strangers, some of whom might use words like “transformation,” “organic,” and “soulchild.”

Which is all tolerable, even well and good and humbling, except when I want to emerge slowly in the morning after having a couple of preparatory cups of coffee and a little CNN fix. Unfortunately, to foster presence, community, and human interaction, the room has no TV and no coffeemaker.

While I was in the shower this morning, Annie burrowed out first in her pajamas, like a blurry-eyed ringtail cat, nosing down the public hallway past the sitting room with its walk-in fireplace and into the common kitchen and its frightening espresso machine.

On her return she shut our room door behind her and slumped back against it, her eyes wide saucers. “Goat milk,” she reported, wrinkling her nose. “I accidentally laced my coffee with goat milk. Took me back to my hippie days in Bolinas. Goat milk. Made my coffee taste like a Greek salad with overtones of feta and hooves. I got a fresh one, but they’re almost out of half and half. There’s just enough for one cup if you hurry.”

Who needs cocaine when a little rush of scarcity bangs into me? I was instantly on a mission, which meant I needed a strategy. “Reverse your regular order. Milk first into the cup, coffee after. That way no one can steal my half and half while I’m brewing my coffee.” Visualizations are big at retreat centers, the secret to making dreams come true. I visualized a fellow guest in a bathrobe, her hair still mussed into bedhead, wandering into the kitchen, spotting me at the espresso machine, and cheerfully greeting me as she casually pulled a cup from a shelf and opened the refrigerator to grab what only I knew to be the last drop of half and half available. Horrors! I stuck to the steps of my strategy and, sighing in relief that the kitchen was empty of humans, bypassed the espresso machine and flung open the refrigerator door.

“Let’s see, goat milk in a carton, I can see why Annie made that mistake, oat milk in a bottle, and …”

Nothing. No cute jar of half and half like yesterday. Ah, but I had spotted the carton of half and half used to fill the glass jar, on the next shelf down, right? Nothing. That shelf was now barren. What the hell?

Despair can take many forms. Our cat fell mortally ill while we were on the road several years ago. I wouldn’t say the missing half and half was quite that bad. But still.

At this point it occurs to me that approximately 300 days of the year I have my coffee in the form of espresso straight, no chaser. I only add milk if the beans are not mine and are likely to be more bitter than the light roast – a wimp’s blend – I favor at home.

I am standing at an espresso machine that offers a range of brew strengths. Instead of an Americano with half and half, I can settle for a weak-brew double espresso. I shrug to myself. So much aggravation with so little purpose. Hmm, good line to remember for my talk this afternoon.

I press the machine’s ON button.

RED ALERT. What it actually says, in red, is “Empty the discarded grounds container.” After trying the obvious places, the back, the left side, the right side, each with its own pull-apart compartment like one of those puzzle cars we had as kids that collapsed into pieces when you pushed a lever at the top, I found the discarded grounds container in the front, right next to the control buttons. Imagine my disdain when it wasn’t even half full of grounds. Plenty of room for the discards of many, many cups of coffee, probably more than would be drunk before I left this joint, and here it’s extorting my labor to carry out the emptying chore before I am allowed my morning refreshment.

Where do you look first for a kitchen trash can? Under the sink, always. Nope. Wait, there’s a cute little extra sink over there. Nope. I’m opening cupboards right and left. Nope. I’m stumped. Desperate, I try the dishwasher door. Turns out it isn’t a dishwasher but a camouflaged garbage drawer with two lined trashcans, neither labeled. One sports a few crumpled aluminum cans, the other some soiled paper plates and napkins. I am holding a plastic container half full of coffee grounds.

As I consider this conundrum, I started to panic for an altogether unrelated reason. I might not have mentioned that this is a post-hippie, organic, locally sourced, working ranch, kind of upscale resort. Over the previous couple of minutes it had occurred to me that they probably had a working vegetable garden, fertilized in part with – drum roll – coffee grounds. If a staff member had been present, I might have asked, “What should I do with the grounds? Do you recycle them?” Now I was worried that at the very point I figured out into which trash the grounds should be dumped, and completed my begrudging chore, a staff member would arrive to catch me in flagrante delicto, Latin for caught while wasting.

I chose the paper products. Feel free to troll me if you disagree.

Reinserting the discarded grounds container into the front of the espresso machine, I happily positioned a coffee cup, and was about to punch the settings that would give me a low-strength double espresso brewed with coffee of doubtful provenance, bitter beans harvested by bitter peasants, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a human coming my way not in a bathrobe or with bedhead but neatly coiffed and dressed, and carrying in front of her, as if manna from Olympus, a carton of, yep, tasty, milky, sucked from the teats of an organically raised and contented cow, non-GMO half and half.

And you think I don’t know anything about the inner critic?

Tears streamed down my cheeks, but I wasn’t sad. Giving a eulogy for my father I was in good cheer, from the pulpit looking into the faces of so many who had known and enjoyed his friendly, brilliant self. The stories I told were charming. The mourners disarmed me with their sober faces. It was as if they wanted me to be gloomy.

Later I asked myself, “What was that? What were those tears if not grief?”

Grief is one of those words that people toss around as if they know something. We hear that everybody grieves differently. Or that there’s a grief curve, a process. Or that grief is natural and shared with elephants.

All of those assume that I know what “grief” is.

Let’s start with the obvious. Being sad means things didn’t go the way I want. Grieving means they really didn’t go the way I want. Being depressed means things are going so bad I give up. Grief falls somewhere between sadness and depression, right?

I don’t know.

How about defining grief as the human reaction to loss? But that doesn’t help; it switches the problem from grief to loss. What is loss? Loss is a change that I wish hadn’t happened, even though everything on earth changes.

Grief and loss are the twin chandeliers that seem to shine on death, a cavernous ballroom of ghosts.

A few years before my dad died, I lost a good friend who, a few days from checking out, held my hand and told me that he feared his own insignificance. I felt a chill. Then a spiritual mentor died, and I couldn’t stop crying. Puzzled by all the tears and scared by my friend, I knew that grief and loss were descending on me as subjects of investigation. Downer.

Providence sent me to a book group that had selected essays of the 16^th Century French deep thinker Montaigne including one unfortunately named “To study philosophy is to learn to die.” A more accurate title might have been “Some helpful ways to hack your fear of death.” Montaigne’s primary suggestion? Befriend it the way you would an unpleasant relative, by spending a lot of quiet time around it. As you get used to him/it, panic settles and you don’t have to lace up your running shoes so fast. In Montaigne’s day, one could stroll around a battlefield before the bodies were carted off. He also recommended hospitals for watching the last days, and mortuaries for the aftermath. Study death and dying, spend time around it, get used to it, and it might release its clutches.

That sounded like a good idea to me. So I volunteered at hospice, and pored over books like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and good old Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Simultaneously, to my alarm and also taboo fascination my dad and my dog both fell into terminal illnesses.

All in all I spent about five years as a closet goth. Here’s what I came up with:

• People often conflate anguish with grief. Anguish is an initial reaction to a major loss, but it fades or is shed well before the end of grief, which generally continues into a broad examination of the particular loss.

• Most grief resolves into gratitude, which makes sense. We grieve the loss of the people or objects that matter to us most, the loved ones who have made notable impressions on us. They influenced who we are, big time. Same with activities. These are the easiest people and events to feel grateful for.

• But gratitude is more than that. Unlike grief, gratitude has an easy time absorbing so-called bad people and bad events. Gratitude feels more like a catchall for memory; I might be grateful for everything that brought me here. So loss is unimportant to gratitude.

• With some lovely exceptions, the person I’m grieving’s major influence ended years ago. They made their point, it was alchemized in me, and life moved on. Most of what was gained was long ago stored in memory. Some of my feeling of loss has transmuted into the bittersweetness of nostalgia, from the Greek for the pain of going home. Exploring grief and loss can reveal the falsehoods of memory as well as the past’s helpful lessons.

• I’ve got an unprovable opinion that the tears part of grief is mostly gratitude, right from the start.

• Lots of people seem to have pretty good deaths nowadays. The luckiest get a months-long or years-long death sentence, giving them time to appreciate the gifts that accompany becoming unattached to the familiar struggles and judgments of civilization. After decades of Americans hiding death from each other, hospice exposed it so anyone can pay attention to what’s really going on, and dying people are encouraged to be fascinated by the process and its lessons.

• Two-thirds of people die in old age. The other third carry the burden of tragedy. I’m always a little put off when I read on social media that a fan is gutted by the death of an 85-year-old famous musician. Personally, I think the formerly alive musician won the lottery, making it to 85. My younger brother used to scan the obituaries for the dead person’s age; if they made 80, he let out a little cheer. Congratulations, dead guy!

• The best book about death is Dead People Suck by comedian Laurie Kilmartin. By far.

• Montaigne was right. The earlier you come to terms with death, the more time you might be free of all the exaggerated fears that it inspires.

Dad died at 87. He was one of the lucky ones who got a death sentence – pulmonary fibrosis, hairs growing into his lungs and eventually clogging them – eighteen months earlier. During that year and a half, I witnessed none of the abject fear that typically accompanies dying. Most hospice patients I visited dropped into one or two shortish bouts of sheer terror near the end; it cleanses the last remnants of attachment to the things of the world, I think. (Dementia, unfortunately, can bring prolonged terror.)

I once heard the modern-day spiritual master Adyashanti tell a relevant story: He asked a big-time Eastern guru (I seem to remember he was Hindu) whether he still feared death.

“By and large, no, I don’t fear death,” the guru said, “but I reserve the right to be terrified at the end.”

Two months before his heart stopped, my dad pulled me aside to confess his sins, don’t ask me why. From what he said, they boiled down to three regrets: offending a friend forty years earlier, ghosting a woman who flirted with him when he was single, and ignoring an interest of his wife’s. To me, these incivilities seemed trivial. I thought as I sat on the side of his bed, “That’s it?” My list would be thousands of items long, fortunately most of them long forgotten.

The next morning I asked him how he felt about his impending death. Dad gave me the same answer he had offered up more than a year before, and every time I had asked him in between: “I don’t like it that there will be a day when I won’t be reading the front page of the New York Times to find out what’s going on around the world.”

Did I think he was dissatisfied at the end? And if he wasn’t dissatisfied with his death, why should I be?

The day Dad died, I waited for the anguish to come. I’m still waiting. My dad lived and died well. I can still tear up for him occasionally, and they continue to be tears of love.

Trying out my new fancy toy, I headed down from our home in Marin County to an appearance in San Diego, six-plus hours in a luxurious, smooth ride. The car drove beautifully, my legs were stretched out, the stereo boomed, and I got to play with all the boy-gadgets that BMWs supply. On the return drive home, the temperature in the Central Valley of California inched up above 72. I turned on the air conditioning.

Warm air.

It turns out that BMW on that model had switched to a freon substitute that had a habit of corroding the inside of the air conditioner condenser until it fell apart and leaked out all the fluid. The repair cost? North of $7,000.

Fortunately, the car had come with a 90-day warranty. When I took it in the following Monday, the service department said the repair was probably covered. It might take 72 hours to find the problem, they said, after which the repair could be done within a few days after that. I figured I’d get my car back in a week.

Six weeks, fourteen lies, and constant blame-shifting later, my car still awaited the repair. When it was delivered at the start of the eighth week, I discovered that they hadn’t completed the repairs. Once my threats hit home, the dealer bought back my car.

The $5,000 Chevy Spark? Never in the shop more than a day. The $23,000 BMW 530e? In the shop seven out of the nine weeks I owned it.

The higher we strive, the more dissatisfaction we encounter. It’s true in everything.

The great songwriter Mose Allison mumbles in my head:

I can’t believe the things I’m seeing
I wonder ‘bout some things I’ve heard
Everybody’s crying mercy
When they don’t know the meaning of the word

Everybody’s complaining, all the time. Today or next month just about everyone I know will mention they’ve been grumpy, cranky, sad or just pissed off at something at least some of the time. It might be politics or family or traffic or the weather. As if we’re all farmers, I’m supposed to be happy that the rains came to California on time this year, but they brought a thriving lawn of grass that I now have to mow. Crap. A drought deserves my concern, right? But having to mow makes me unhappy, too.

Let’s start with the obvious. Being dissatisfied means things didn’t go the way I want. Hmmm. The way I want. Maybe that’s the part I need to understand first.

Wanting things is natural and relentless for us humans with our pleasure principle and our conscious way of picking objects and concepts out of the field to play with. I want a bicycle for Christmas. I want you. I want to be happy. I want a new car. I want gravy on my potatoes, please. I want this or that. Some parents and religions say it’s bad to want too much, but they’re mistaking “I want” for “I expect to get.”

When I want, I’m just being curious. Curiosity and wanting are the same thing. Watch a mother and daughter in a clothes store, going through the racks. Over and over they pull a skirt or blouse out to inspect it. That’s curiosity. When they say, “cute,” it means they want it. But maybe they just walked into the store to look, not buy. They had no expectation of getting, so they just participated in open-ended wanting.

We’re designed to be curious, to pick things to play with, consume, watch, ride, explore, touch, puzzle out, join together, take apart, and in general do something with.

Every thought, project, sentence, action, plan, or activity I engage begins with curiosity, the act of wanting and bringing close. We are relentless and compulsive in our wanting, our being curious. There’s nothing wrong with that. If I objected to wanting, it would be the same as wishing I lacked touch, sight, mind, feeling.

When I switch from wanting to getting, things go to shit. I’m always stuck with a lot of unintended consequences. If it’s a car, maintenance and payments, breakdowns and recalls. The fancier the car, the more likely all of the above. If it’s an ice cream cone, calories and diabetes. If it’s a tropical vacation, rain. If it’s a partner, betrayal. No, not always, but one way or another nothing achieved or possessed arrives completely as expected. We rely on our extraordinary powers of adaptation to adjust to the consequences we inflict on ourselves. Twice in my life I ended up on food stamps. Twice in my life I was wealthier than I could have imagined. I’ve been poor and happy, and rich and unhappy.

I don’t restrain my curiosity any more than I curb my breathing. Wanting to be intimate with things and concepts is the human condition as much as sensing danger is. Other words for wanting are fascination, relating, and love.

So disappointment is not a necessary component of wanting. Sometimes it arrives, as when the object of curiosity turns out to be less interesting than I thought, but more often I’m satisfied just to momentarily touch on the thing that attracted me. The first taste of the ice cream cone, the one before it drips on my shorts, is usually the best. Disappointment may be required, though, when I switch from wanting to expecting to get and keep. The more I want to keep licking the ice cream, the more resentful I will be when all that’s left is cone.

What was the phrase we were torturing here? Things not going the way I want. The way I want. Now we have a completely different activity than being curious, or wanting. When I add “the way” to “I want,” my mind has constructed a framework that is supposed to go one way, as if I was the big guy in control. And if things don’t go right? It’s as if the train I’m engineering has jumped the track. What track? Where did that framework come from?

Surely not nature.

That’s right folks, true nature, the feral woods and wide universe, expresses no morality or improved direction. Nature just happens, neatly and completely, as if in an ongoing present without looking back or ahead. Whoa, a roller coaster that never stops. And never jumps the track. Hang on!

The framework of wanting things to go a certain way is oddly unnecessary, and peculiarly a trap of our own making, us civilized humans. Dogs don’t want things out of curiosity, or a creative urge to make things better. They react to environmental triggers without what we call rational thought, through simple associations of pain and pleasure that are immediate and lack memory or prediction.

We’ve been humans with the same size brains for 300,000 years. We’ve had language for about 100,000 years. It was only 10,000 years ago that civilization started up – probably the result of deciding to store food, whose unintended consequences included overpopulation, hierarchies, complicated moral codes, a massive influx of artisans and possessions, and all the busyness of maintaining a life whose interests could stretch far beyond food, shelter, and clothing. Good for the species, which encourages overpopulation, bad for all of us living in the paranoia of civilization.

It used to be simple: Go out and get your food for the day, repair a couple of palm frond roof tiles, and then loll with your family and friends in your jungle or veldt clearing. There was no better. No worse, either, except the occasional natural disaster: a flood, a fall from a tree, a toxic parasite, a large mammal with big teeth.

To the 300,000 years of humans who preceded us, who were just as smart and curious, we civilized humans lead unbelievably complicated lives. The world each hunter-gatherer human was born into didn’t change during their lifetime in habits, dangers, possessions, or activities. As civilized people we expect frequent change, and we constantly keep our eyes sharp for something better. We want more or different than what we have. We seem to be primarily motivated by dissatisfaction. Why? Because everything in our culture, including our parents and friends, tells us that’s how the wheels go round and round. Sociologists remind us daily that the next generation’s expectations for a better life are being dashed by the rise of the hoarding class or the influx of refugees or the warming climate or the loss of manufacturing or one of a thousand evil forces. Excuse me. Why exactly do I need to be better off than my parents, or even enjoy as high a standard of living as they do? Am I sure that standard of living is the end-all measurement for freedom and happiness?

You don’t have to go that far with me. Let me make it a lot easier. Think about your most recent bit of disappointment, just that one. Not getting to see Taylor Swift. Your car throwing a rod. Your mother. Make yourself feel sad thinking about it. Now right now, right at this very moment, if you were to stop reading this page for a moment, you would think it normal to continue to feel sad for a while. But what in the hell does having missed that concert or gone into debt to pay the repair bill or having a mother who doesn’t really get you have to do with your capacity for satisfaction right now?

I can feel satisfied looking out the window for twenty seconds, can’t I? I can notice that missing a concert, going into debt, and resenting my mother are pretty standard disappointments. Which means they happen to lots of people lots of times and are part of normal, not abnormal. But the framework says that I’m sad because things were supposed to go a different way for me. Why should that make me sad? Sometimes things go sideways. As humans we are terrible at predicting the future, but just good enough to have the hubris to believe that our predictions shouldn’t be messed up by the reality of a system that doesn’t actually care what we think, just keeps rolling on. And we’re never encouraged to notice that our true superpower isn’t achievement or betterment. It’s adaptation. You and I both have a 100 percent success rate at adaptation to misfortune.

I couldn’t stop myself, by the way. As soon as the check from the BMW dealer cleared, I was wandering around another BMW showroom and lot, and within a week had my replacement 530e, still used but a few years newer so it had the improved air conditioning unit, less susceptible to corrosion. And I paid for an extended warranty. Knowing things will go wrong, big time, I covered myself. Hell, keeping my new car out of the shop 50 percent of the time will be an improvement. That’s satisfying.

As meditators follow their breath, they notice that the in-breath seems to rise and stop at the head and the out-breath seems to fall and stop at the base of the torso. Commonly, they learn that a breath has four parts: the rising breath, the short stop at the top, the falling breath, and the short stop at the bottom. Repeat as necessary.

This isn’t the anatomical circulation of breath or air in the body, which comes in at the nose and mouth and extends into the lungs where oxygen joins with the blood and carbon dioxide is separated out for expulsion through the nose and mouth. The meditative circulation of breath has its own geography.

A second common meditative circulation is traced by practitioners of microcosmic orbital meditation. The meditator follows energy, not breath, as it enters the perineum, travels up the spine and over the crown to the forehead, departs the body and curves its way out and around and back to the perineum. Microcosmic meditation amplifies lifeforce energy.

Here’s another circulation to notice, not of energy, not of breath, but of thought. Thoughts arrive in the head center, fall to the abdomen where they are combined into meanings, and rise to the heart where their meanings are expelled into the world. And it starts all over again.

The Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff referred to humans as three-centered beings. Western seekers are quite used to viewing ourselves this way: mind, body, heart. In many of our practices the focus is on integration of mind, body, and heart, getting the three centers to cooperate and react to stimuli simultaneously. But there’s also a circulation of thought; the three centers also react to stimuli in time and in a serial fashion.

We take in stimuli through our head center, where our mind is prominent. We believe that our mind is primarily a location of analysis, synthesis, and meaning generation. But mostly our mind is just taking in stimuli. After a little practice with mindfulness meditation, anyone can notice that most thoughts are fragments, as if we’re grabbing and letting go of many possibilities for our next full thought or idea or project. Our mind is a curiosity machine, constantly reaching out to bring something closer, like an infant with a red rubber ball. Most we discard quickly as uninteresting; those are the fragments. A few thoughts are complete sentences; we think they’re the property of the mind, too, because we find them mixed in with the fragments. But what if they’re not? What if they’re a later narration of what has already happened elsewhere in the body?

The ancient Chinese located the creative lifeforce in the dantian, a spot two finger-widths below the navel and two finger-widths inside. Here resides your chi, which besides lifeforce or energy source might also be described as your creative center. What does a creative center do? It takes bits and pieces and makes sentences or songs or house plans or rocket ships out of them. Your creative center – located centrally in your torso or body, not your head center – solves puzzles made of the components sent down by the head center. Sometimes an outsider asks for a puzzle to be solved, but you are still required to select out of the ether the components that would best fit together, and it’s your trial and error, rejecting some components you select and replacing them with better ones. Your creative act becomes a mechanical task of finding components with the proper valences to combine in a meaningful way. Your superpower is discriminating the fine properties of one thing from another, and even splitting hairs to improve the fit. Creativity is puzzle-solving, and so is meaning-making.

Our body is our assembly line, accepting the gifts of our mind – the fragments, half-baked ideas, and puzzle pieces cast down into the abdomen – and once finished with construction, sending its created work up to the heart for it to be shared with the world.

The heart has the easiest job. It collects the construction into its cavity, and then opens a valve and sprays the finished puzzle out into the world, where the new idea – the solved puzzle whose completion is what we call a meaning – mixes with everything else as just another ephemeral happenstance. And the whole shebang starts over again.

This theory of the circulation of thought offers some striking corollaries. 

1.     If my head center is primarily a place of curiosity, then it may be less judgmental and more playful than I think.

2.     Judgment might belong in the body, which is a more consistent truth-teller than the head center. Creativity may draw from an inner guidance – a truth-o-meter – that is body-centric.

3.     If the heart’s job is to spray everything created out into the world, then I’m wasting my time in post-mortems. The world apparently wants my contribution, no matter what I think.

4.     And by the heart clearing past solved puzzles, or what we call statements of meaning, I can always start a new ephemeral project or idea or puzzle unburdened.

It’s also worth noting that I can find a subtle heart and body in my head center, a mind and heart in my body center, and a body and mind in my heart center. The head center, for instance, isn’t just selecting variable components, but also is joining the bigger consciousness that envelops the heart and body, too. So even while inventing its new puzzle to solve, it has at the same time solved it and released it. Just as free will can toggle with determinism, describing the same events differently, so can time stretch to measure paused objects in relation with each other and at the same time be frozen to contain the entire interdependency of everything now, past, and future as a dependent arising. The paradox of having free will within a deterministic flow becomes evident as the circulation of thought is observed. Free will becomes more a plaything than a fateful struggle when the triviality of the components that the playful head center has pulled out of the field of 10,000 things is on display.

The more that judgment is left up to the body center, where truth is reliable and lands as a feeling, the more the head center is free to play. And the easier it is for the heart to spray your own lifeforce meanings into the world, willy-nilly.

A while ago I wrote about the therapeutic value of dismissing free will for a bit and dipping into a world without right or wrong, good or bad, or better and worse. Not so long as to get in trouble, mind you, but enough to feel a little lighter when you return to managing all the bits and pieces of your life.

I mentioned a couple of standard thought experiments that you’ve already encountered that allow such a visit: a walk in the woods, or contemplating heaven.

Scientific thought experiments have been around since Galileo tested whether two balls of different weight would hit the ground at the same time. That early exploration of what Newton later found to be gravity was a thought experiment first, but it required a quick material experiment right after. Einstein turned thought experiments inside out, using imaginary possibilities that would be impossible to test – as goalposts to work toward, to search for, or to measure.

The teacher who brought me most of the way to freedom is a spiritual master named Hameed Ali, who writes under the pen name A.H. Almaas. He’s very good at thought experiments, which makes sense since he intended to be a physicist, even starting a Ph.D. at Berkeley before diverting into the psychospiritual realms he has explored for fifty years now.

Psychospiritual sounds weird. Ali thinks and writes about the juncture of psychology and spirituality. How much do psychological issues drive a person’s spiritual path? Did you find God when you bottomed out? Are you looking for freedom as an escape route from a cruel household? Those sort of questions. Along the way, Ali has probably done more than any one person in history, William James included, to catalog the varieties of spiritual experience. He immerses himself in them, from varieties of Buddhism and Hinduism to Sufism and Christianity and Shamanism and philosophical systems like phenomenology, Platonism, Kantian and quanta theories, and on and on. At some point he figures out what kind of deterministic universe they are describing, and uses his imagination to enter it.

I’m trying to bring his myriad thought experiments to a more general audience. Usually they’re contained in his Ridhwan School, a network of small groups who test out and learn from his mindgames, often in structured meetings that invoke thought experiments in a curriculum that is designed to take a student from ordinary dissatisfaction to the possibility of fairly consistent equanimity. I use the same thought experiments with my clients who are not Ridhwan students and who find them useful in reducing anxiety and increasing a sense of freedom and ease in the world. Which isn’t all that much different from what the Ridhwan School did for me.

I’ll start with a series of thought experiments that I sometimes engage on walks in the woods.

Once my stride is relaxed and regular, I say to myself with each step, “Non-abiding.” It sounds in my inner ear like “Non-abiding, non-abiding, non-abiding, non-abiding.” I do four and then another four and another four and another four until what “non-abiding” means seems to have sunk in. What is it to be non-abiding? I’m mentally footloose, not sticking to a thought, but encouraging a scattered, disorganized interest in what’s around me, not landing anywhere.

Once the willly-nilly vibe of the non-abiding approach has settled in, I switch to a new word, repeated with each step the same way. This time it’s “Non-identifying, non-identifying, non-identifying, non-identifying.” Now I’m not even allowing myself to name the objects or concepts my mind is momentarily picking out of the field. A tree is instead a brown thing, or a tall bit of brown. My sore knee is a hinge at best.

Once the non-identifying approach has settled in, I switch to a new word. This time it’s “Non-preferring.” I’m removing judgment, which often is the last wall between me and direct contact with the world. I don’t care whether I’m cold or hot, whether my left knee is sore, whether the trail is slippery. (Without seeming to be conscious of these things, I’ll still adjust appropriately, by the way.) “Non-preferring, non-preferring, non-preferring, non-preferring.” I don’t care whether the sky is blue, grey, or purple. My concerns for things being a certain way can disappear for the time being.

Once I’m no longer preferring one state or thing over another, I switch to “Non-doing.” Now I move my body into autopilot, and let go of caring whether my legs are moving or my thoughts tripping out or the trail narrowing or my arms swinging. “Non-doing, non-doing, non-doing, non-doing.” I abandon control of anything, and let the body that is mine proceed without mental influence, and my mind likewise ramble without mental influence.

Non-abiding for four beats, over and over.

Non-identifying for four beats, over and over.

Non-preferring for four beats, over and over.

Non-doing for four beats, over and over.

I know, I know. It’s kind of complicated. But it’s my favorite entry into freedom.

Of all the genders, men are the worst. We are an ill-tempered lot, grumpy, quick to offense, and overly competitive. We cannot handle rejection.

This picture emerged over ten years of online dating, perhaps seventy first dates, before I found my soul partner at age 61. In the subsequent decade, I haven’t gotten over the horrible dating stories that spilled out matter-of-factly from a broad swath of charming and likable women whom I met over a glass of wine or tea. As I caught on to the pattern of male nastiness, I became fascinated and asked about it during my own first dates. The women immediately opened up. Almost all of them had a terrible story. I often felt like apologizing for my sex.

On the way to the last No Kings rally, I mentioned that I was writing about this. Immediately one of my passengers told this story:

“After a second date, I told the guy by email that he seemed like a great, kind guy, and our conversation had been fascinating, but that I wasn’t looking to continue. He emailed and asked whether he had done something wrong. I told him no, and reiterated that he seemed like a terrific guy, just not what I was looking for. He wrote back, ‘Well I didn’t think you were very pretty anyway.’”

Here are reactions from spurned men that I recall hearing about from women I dated. Keep in mind that the behaviors described, and the fright the men inspired, all occurred after one, two, or three dates, a tiny amount of time in which to get to know someone. All the men in question were well-educated and relatively high-income, and up to the point of rejection seemed normal and well-adjusted.

“He told me I was a bitch.” “He wouldn’t stop emailing me.” “He called me every name in the book.” “He said I would regret it the rest of my life.” “I actually got scared.” “Talk about Jekyll and Hyde.” “He said I was an ugly loser.”

I learned that once a woman in the dating pool had caught on to this male pattern awfulness, she adjusted her rejection behavior.

“I’m always vague about the reason, so the guy won’t have anything specific he can attack me for.” “Ghosting is the best way out, with the fewest repercussions.” “I immediately block them.” “Being nice doesn’t help.”

What’s going on here? Why are men so creepy? The theme I started to consider was that American men are not taught how to handle rejection. At all. Dating rejection is one example, but an exaggerated fear of losing face spreads across male activities, from making friends to participating in sex to working in a job and playing house. Women and gay men will probably shrug at what I’m saying as old hat. But believe me that most men are oblivious to their own mess.

First, a little statistical grounding at the extreme edge of this problem:

Men are four times more likely to kill a partner than women. They are three times more likely to commit non-lethal domestic violence than women, and a higher percentage of female violence is in self-defense.

Here’s Margaret Atwood in 1982 on the same subject:

Why do men feel threatened by women? I asked a male friend of mine. … “I mean,” I said, “men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.”

“They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their worldview.”

Then I asked some women students … “Why do women feel threatened by men?”

“They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.

More statistics: Women are more sensitive to rejection, but offset that by reconnecting with friends after rejection. Men tend to withdraw socially after a rejection. Women repair; men sulk.

Researchers say that cisgender men are the most likely to react to sexual rejection with anger or further pursuit.

One more point: What’s the maximum compliment women share with each other when praising a male partner? “He’s a good guy.” It’s not-so-subtle code for a man who displays basic decency and respect for women. In any other context, “good guy” might be damning with faint praise. But in the world of male-female relationships, the bar for an acceptable man is low.

Over the next few months off and on I’ll explore this horrorshow, not for schadenfreude, but to describe causes and solutions where known. You might already have your own theories of causality: DNA, Darwin, evolutionary psychology, paternalism, sports mania, toy guns versus dolls, misogyny, arrested development, competition, pecking orders, rugged individualism, capitalism, bullying, locker room talk, cultural stereotypes, invulnerability, emotional illiteracy … you get the point. They’re all part of the picture, and they can all be in play for understanding and correction.

My spiritual adventure was kicked off by an accidental meditation. A friend asked me to a silent retreat with the modern master Adyashanti. Can you remember the first time you found yourself stranded in a room of people sitting silently with their eyes closed – for an hour? Pretty weird, and as comfortable as my dog with the mail carrier. But in my inaugural meditation almost immediately a supernatural vision appeared, of dark, cloudy dragonbreath being sucked out of my mouth by gentle Adyashanti on his throne in the front of the room and returned after examination. Against my rationalist will I was introduced to a bizarre spiritual realm as a reality. My discomfort was replaced by astonishment. I was an excited dog with a new toy.

That was seventeen or eighteen years ago. These days I seldom sit for meditation. You might expect me to apologize for that. Many faith traditions advocate insistently for lifelong daily meditation or prayer. Some Zen communities declare meditation to be the end-all and be-all.

The meditation that most of you learn is a concentration practice. Whether it’s called insight, vipassana, mindfulness, or something else, you sit quietly and pay attention to the rise and fall of your breath, or some inner or outer object. The point is to gain some distance from your thoughts so you can observe their patterns.

Here’s where it gets confusing. You might be told to watch your thoughts and see how they stream without beginning or end. Another teacher might ask you to separate your thoughts into categories – fragments, fantasies, practicalities, lists, whatever. A third teacher might want you to focus only on the thoughts that criticize. Some gurus ask you then to ignore your thoughts; other gurus encourage thoughts to amplify.

What beginning meditators aren’t told is that all the hard work of getting used to how your thoughts behave is not an end, but a means to self-inquiry.

By instructing myself in the morning that my thoughts come in different categories, some of them more reliable and trustworthy, later in the day when a disturbing thought comes my way I can catch its tone and remember that it’s that old specific voice that exaggerates danger.

In my inner critic work with clients, they objectify their personal gremlin and interrogate its belittling remarks. Many of my clients meditate also, and I point out that they can use their morning sitting practice to notice the flavor and character of the thoughts that belong to the inner critic. That way meditation can support the inner critic work through the day. The inner critic’s tells and tip-offs – its bullying tone and repetitive language – show themselves in the client’s everyday conflicts. The response I teach? “Oh, that’s you, inner critic.”

I first learned to meditate like that, as a tool that works in conjunction with inner critic work. Those two practices, meditation and inner critic work, provided 90 percent of my access to freedom. I found little need for mantras, devotion, or affirmations. But that’s just me and my way of skinning the cat.

If you learned Transcendental Meditation, it’s a little different. Using a mantra to occupy the mindspace, the TM practitioner can move quickly into a crystalline space of relaxation and satisfaction. It’s almost but not quite mindlessness.

Both kinds of meditation, concentration or transcendental, leave the successful practitioner with a hangover feeling of relaxation. And that’s enough of a benefit to keep people sitting silently in the morning for twenty minutes the rest of their lives.

Most, though, miss out on the true wonders, which happen when self-inquiry – figuring out who I might be without my identities – has advanced to a place where the world’s social dangers are no longer exaggerated. Well, some of the time.

I meditated regularly for ten or so years. But a point came at which I not only could notice the inner critic’s voice readily, but I actually sought it out, so that I could free myself from it. Like a friend who has moved away, concentration meditation lost its interest in me. Now I meditate occasionally, sometimes with Annie while listening to the soothing voice of Gil Fronsdal, other times on a walk in the woods. It’s still a relaxing and refreshing way to reawaken to the divine.

I think I’ll leave it there for another time. Just this: What if meditation is a tool that pries open a harder and more treacherous practice of staying with bad thoughts long enough to capture their insincere underpinnings? And that it’s the self-inquiry practice that eventually opens the door to freedom?