 THE UNDEFEATED MIND Fall 2012 |
 Photo: prep4md “I don’t want to give them up,” my patient told me. “Why not?” I asked. “I’ve been reading some articles on the Internet that say they might cure me.” Tragically, he was referring to vitamin supplements, which he’d somehow come to believe would cure him of Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. Continue reading…  Photo: vxla Before having our son, my wife and I debated for many years about whether or not we wanted to have children at all. Unlike most people (it seems) we were both ambivalent about the prospect. On the one hand, we felt having and raising a child would be a unique and wonderful experience, one we both had little previous experience to help us fully anticipate. On the other hand, Continue reading…  Photo: _rockinfree When I was originally introduced to the form of Buddhism I now practice, Nichiren Buddhism, one of the things I found most attractive about it was the concept that we’re all fully responsible for the entirety of our lives, a notion rooted in the principle of the simultaneity of cause and effect. In essence, this principle states that everything we experience in our lives today appears as an effect of causes we ourselves have made in the past, and that everything we’ll see in the future will occur as a result of causes we ourselves are making in the present. Continue reading…  Photo: kelsey_lovefusionphoto I remember horsing around once with my younger brothers in one of our bedrooms one Saturday morning when we were children. At one point, one of my brothers jumped off his bed, and as he flew up in the air, I flung a pillow at his feet. “Ow!” he yelled when he landed, and gripped his foot. He started writhing on the floor in obvious pain. And, strangely, I started to laugh. Continue reading…  Photo: Shermeee Nothing in the world is quite so awful as boredom. Unmitigated pain—physical or emotional—is commonly viewed as giving rise to the worst kind of suffering, but the suffering engendered by true boredom, though qualitatively different, is perhaps in some ways just as terrible. I’m not talking about being bored for a few hours while waiting in line at Disneyland or in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. I’m talking about finding life itself not only uninteresting but also purposeless. I’m talking about what I call existential boredom. Continue reading…  Photo: wonderlane By nature I’ve always been an excessively introspective person. My entire life I’ve believed, as Socrates said, that “the unexamined life isn’t worth living.” Even now, my wife frequently accuses me of living mostly in my own head. But in my first year of college, in response to my voicing my commitment to this credo, a friend of mine once replied, “Nor is the unlived life worth examining.” Continue reading…  Photo: nathanborror I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: we are, all of us, meaning-seeking creatures. We seek not only to define the meaning of our lives by adopting, whether consciously or unconsciously, an over-arching purpose, but also to understand the reason for almost everything that happens in the course of each day. Why did our boss change our work schedule? Why does our spouse care so much about the clothes we wear? Why is traffic snarled for miles ahead of us? Why did that man in the news kidnap and rape that girl? Continue reading…  Photo: nordique I saw a patient of mine recently whose appearance in my office always makes me smile. He’s challenging—not because he’s a difficult person (quite the opposite), but because he has so many serious medical problems about which I can do little. Why, then, does seeing him so consistently lighten my mood? Because it reminds me that for all the terrible things that go on—the abuse, the discrimination, the injustice, the downright nastiness—good still exists in the world. Because, you see, he’s a hero. Continue reading…  Photo: fontplaydotcom I’ve chosen three questions from readers to discuss in this week’s post. To those who sent me these questions, please recognize my answers are by necessity general as I obviously don’t know you personally nor the details of the situations you wrote about. I do hope my answers can provide you new ways to think about the problems you’re facing as well as provide other readers useful perspectives on similar situations they may be facing in their own lives, but please don’t mistake any of the following for my professional medical advice. Continue reading…  Photo: simminch Once while I was jogging along Lake Michigan, I came upon a large crowd surrounding a middle-aged man lying supine on the ground. I stopped to assess the scene and saw the man wasn’t moving—at all. Two people were bending over him and trying to shake him awake. “What happened?” I asked. “He fell,” someone, a woman, said. Continue reading… |
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