Where all roads lead (2)
[Back to Part 1]
We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.
“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.
She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:
“I don’t want to die.”
Now let’s freeze this tableau for a moment and make a few things clear. The first is that I love this child so much I would throw myself under Pat Robertson for her. She’s one of just four people whose health and happiness are vital to my own. When she is sad, I want to make her happy. It’s one of the simplest equations in my life.
I say such obvious things because it is often assumed that nonreligious parents respond to their children’s fears of death by saying, in essence, Suck it up, worm food. When one early reviewer of Parenting Beyond Belief implied that that was the book’s approach, I tore him a new one. I am convinced that there are real comforts to be found in a naturalistic view of death, that our mortality lends a new preciousness to life, and that it is not just more truthful but more humane and more loving to introduce the concept of a life that truly ends than it is to proffer an immortality their inquiring minds will have to painfully discard later.
But all my smiling confidence threatens to dissolve under the tears of my children.
“I know, punkin,” I said, cradling her head as she convulsed with sobs. “Nobody wants to die. I sure don’t. But you know what? First you get to live for a hundred years. Think about that. You’ll be older than Great-Grandma Huey!”
It’s a cheap opening gambit. It worked the last time we had this conversation, when Laney was four.
Not this time.
“But it will come,” she said, hiffing. “Even if it’s a long way away, it will come, and I don’t want it to! I want to stay alive!”
I took a deep breath. “I know,” I said. “It’s such a strange thing to think about. Sometimes it scares me. But you know what? Whenever I’m scared of dying, I remember that being scared means I’m not understanding it right.”
She stopped hiffing and looked at me. “I don’t get it.”
“Well what do you think being dead is like?”
She thought for a minute. “It’s like you’re all still and it’s dark forever.”
A chill went down my spine. She had described my childhood image of death precisely. When I pictured myself dead, it was me-floating-in-darkness-forever. It’s the most awful thing I can imagine. Hell would be better than an eternal, mute, insensate limbo.
“That’s how I think of it sometimes too. And that frrrrreaks me out! But that’s not how it is.”
“But how do you know?” she asked pleadingly. “How do you know what it’s like?”
“Because I’ve already been there.”
“What! Haha! No you haven’t!”
“Yes I have, and so have you.”
“What? No I haven’t.”
“After I die, I will be nowhere. I won’t be floating in darkness. There will be no Dale McGowan, right?”
“And millions of worms will eat your body!!” chirped Erin, unhelpfully.
“…”
“Well they will.”
“Uh…yeah. But I won’t care because I won’t be there.”
“Still.”
I turned back to her sister. “So a hundred years from now, I won’t be anywhere, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Okay. Now where was I a hundred years ago? Before I was born?”
“Where were you? You weren’t anywhere.”
“And was I afraid?”
“No, becau…OMIGOSH, IT’S THE SAME!!”
It hit both girls at the same instant. They bolted upright with looks of astonishment.
“Yep, it’s exactly the same. There’s no difference at all between not existing before you were born and not existing after you die. None. So if you weren’t scared then, you shouldn’t be scared about going back to it. I still get scared sometimes because I forget that. But then I try to really understand it again and I feel much better.”
The crisis was over, but they clearly wanted to keep going.
“You know something else I like to think about?” I asked. “I think about the egg that came down into my mommy’s tummy right before me. And the one before that, and before that. All of those people never even got a chance to exist, and they never will. There are billions and trillions of people who never even got a chance to be here. But I made it! I get a chance to be alive and playing and laughing and dancing and burping and farting…”
(Brief intermission for laughter and sound effects.)
“I could have just not existed forever — but instead, I get to be alive for a hundred years! And you too! Woohoo! We made it!”
“Omigosh,” Laney said, staring into space. “I’m like…the luckiest thing ever.”
“Exactly. So sometimes when I start to complain because it doesn’t last forever, I picture all those people who never existed telling me, ‘Hey, wait a minute. At least you got a chance. Don’t be piggy.'”
More sound effects, more laughter.
Coming to grips with mortality is a lifelong process, one that ebbs and flows for me, as I know it will for them. Delaney was perfectly fine going to sleep that night, and fine the next morning, and the morning after that. It will catch up to her again, but every time it comes it will be more familiar and potentially less frightening. We’ll talk about the other consolations — that every bit of you came from the stars and will return to the stars, the peaceful symphony of endorphins that usually accompanies dying, and so on. If all goes well, her head start may help her come up with new consolations to share with the rest of us.
In his brilliant classic The Tangled Wing, Emory psychologist Melvin Konner notes that “from age three to five [children] consider [death] reversible, resembling a journey or sleep. After six they view it as a fact of life but a very remote one” (p. 369). Though rates of development vary, Konner places the first true grasp of the finality and universality of death around age ten—a realization that includes the first dawning deep awareness that it applies to them as well. So grappling with the concept early, before we are paralyzed by the fear of it, can go a long way toward fending off that fear in the long run.
Laney, for better and worse, is ahead of the curve. All I can do is keep reminding her, and myself, that knowing and understanding something helps tame our fears. It may not completely feed the bulldog — the fear is too deeply ingrained to ever go completely — but it’s a bigger, better Milk-Bone than anything else we have.
Where all roads lead (1)
I have 22 posts jostling for attention at the moment, but a Saturday night conversation with my girls has sent all other topics back to the green room for a smoke.
The three of us were lying on my bed, looking at the ceiling and talking about the day. “Dad, I have to tell you a thing. Promise you won’t get mad,” said Delaney (6), giving me the blinky doe eyes. “Promise?”
“Oh jeez, Laney, so dramatic,” said Erin, pot-to-kettlishly.
“I plan to be furious,” I said. “Out with it.”
“Okay, fine. I…I kind of got into a God fight in the cafeteria yesterday.”
I pictured children barricaded behind overturned cafeteria tables, lobbing Buddha-shaped meatballs, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and Jesus tortillas at each other. A high-pitched voice off-camera shouts Allahu akbar!
“What’s a ‘God fight’?”
“Well I asked Courtney if she could come over on Sunday, and she said, ‘No, my family will be in church of course.’ And I said oh, what church do you go to? And she said she didn’t know, and she asked what church we go to. And I said we don’t go to church, and she said ‘Don’t you believe in God?’, and I said no, but I’m still thinking about it, and she said ‘But you HAVE to go to church and you HAVE to believe in God,” and I said no you don’t, different people can believe different things.”
Regular readers will recognize this as an almost letter-perfect transcript of a conversation Laney had with another friend last October.
I asked if the two of them were yelling or getting upset with each other. “No,” she said, “we were just talking.”
“Then I wouldn’t call it a fight. You were having a conversation about cool and interesting things.”
Delaney: Then Courtney said, ‘But if there isn’t a God, then how did the whole world and trees and people get made so perfect?’
Dad: Ooo, good question. What’d you say?
Delaney: I said, ‘But why did he make the murderers? And the bees with stingers? And the scorpions?’
Now I don’t know about you, but I doubt my first grade table banter rose to quite this level. Courtney had opened with the argument from design. Delaney countered with the argument from evil.
Delaney: But then I started wondering about how the world did get made. Do the scientists know?
I described Big Bang theory to her, something we had somehow never covered. Erin filled in the gaps with what she remembered from our own talk, that “gravity made the stars start burning,” and “the earth used to be all lava, and it cooled down.”
Laney was nodding, but her eyes were distant. “That’s cool,” she said at last. “But what made the bang happen in the first place?”
Connor had asked that exact question when he was five. I was so thrilled at the time that I wrote it into his fictional counterpart in my novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff:
“Dad, how did the whole universe get made?”
Okay now. Teachable moment, Jack, don’t screw it up. “Well it’s like this. A long time ago – so long ago you wouldn’t even believe it – there was nothing anywhere but black space. And in the middle of all that nothing, there was all the world and the planets and stars and sun and everything all mashed into a tiny, tiny little ball, smaller than you could even see. And all of a sudden BOOOOOOOM!! The little ball exploded out and made the whole universe and the world and everything. Isn’t that amazing!”
Beat, beat, and…action. “Why did it do that? What made it explode?”
“Well, that’s a good question. Maybe it was just packed in so tight that it had to explode.”
“Maybe?” His forehead wrinkles. “So you mean nobody knows?”
“That’s right. Nobody knows for sure. “
“I don’t like that.”
“Well, you can become a scientist and help figure it out.”
“…”
“…”
“Dad, is God pretend?”
“Well, some people think he’s pretend and other people think he’s real.”
“How ’bout Jesus?”
“Well, he was probably a real guy for sure, one way or the other.”
Pause. “Well, we might never know if God is real, ’cause he’s up in the sky. But we can figure out if Jesus is real, ’cause he lived on the ground.”
“You’re way ahead of most people.”
“Uh huh. Dad?”
“Yeah, Con.”
“Would you still love me if all my boogers were squirtin’ out at you?” Pushes up the tip of his nose for maximum verité.
“No, Con, that’d pretty much tear it. Out you’d go.”
“I bet not.”
“Just try me.”
I told Laney the same thing—that we don’t know what caused the whole thing to start. “But some people think God did it,” I added.
She nodded.
“The only problem with that,” I said, “is that if God made everything, then who…”
“Oh my gosh!” Erin interrupted. “WHO MADE GOD?! I never thought of that!”
“Maybe another God made that God,” Laney offered.
“Maybe so, b…”
“OH WAIT!” she said. “Wait! But then who made THAT God? OMIGOSH!”
They giggled with excitement at their abilities. I can’t begin to describe how these moments move me. At ages six and ten, my girls had heard and rejected the cosmological (“First Cause”) argument within 30 seconds, using the same reasoning Bertrand Russell described in Why I Am Not a Christian:
I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.
…and Russell in turn was describing Mill, as a child, discovering the same thing. I doubt that Mill’s father was less moved than I am by the realization that confident claims of “obviousness,” even when swathed in polysyllables and Latin, often have foundations so rotten that they can be neutered by thoughtful children.
There was more to come. Both girls sat up and barked excited questions and answers. We somehow ended up on Buddha, then reincarnation, then evolution, and the fact that we are literally related to trees, grass, squirrels, mosses, butterflies and blue whales.
It was an incredible freewheeling conversation I will never, ever forget. It led, as all honest roads eventually do, to the fact that everything that lives also dies. We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.
“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.
She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:
“I don’t want to die.”
Looking back…and it’s about time (2 of 2)
Guest column by Becca McGowan
I don’t think there is a God; but I wish there was one.
There it is. I said it.
I had never actually said this to anyone until my seven-year-old daughter asked me point-blank, “Mom, do you believe in God?” It had been easy to avoid a concrete answer up to that point because virtually all religious conversations in our home were between Dale and the kids. I was content to listen during family discussions and participate only in the easy parts: Everybody believes different things…the bible is filled with stories that teach people…we should learn about other people’s beliefs…we should keep asking questions so we can decide what we think…those were the easy parts. I told myself that I was still thinking about it.
The problem is that deep down, I had already decided. And I had decided that God was not real. God was created from the human desire to explain what we didn’t understand. God was an always-supportive father figure, able to get us through difficult times when human fathers were insufficient. I now believed what I had only toyed with in Mr. Tresize’s high school mythology class: A thousand years from now, people will look back on our times and say, “Look, back then the Christian myth held that there was one God and that his son became man…”
But wait a minute! This can’t be! Did I actually say this out loud to my daughter?! I am a GOOD person. I am a KIND person. I help OTHERS. As I left for school each day as a little girl, my mother always said, “Remember, you are a Christian young lady.” That’s who I AM!
Now, here I was, a mother, encouraging my children to keep asking questions, keep reading, keep talking with others. I want my children to think and learn. Then, I tell them, decide for yourself.
But had I ever asked questions about religion? Had I ever read about religion or talked with others? Had I actually decided for myself? No. I became a church-attending Christian as a way to rebel against my stepfather. I hadn’t thought about it for a day in my life.
Flash back eight years, driving home from church in our minivan, when Dale said to me, “I just can’t go to church anymore.” I was devastated.
I continued to attend church on my own for a couple of years. I also began reading Karen Armstrong’s In the Beginning. And I began to think about why I believed. The more I read and talked and debated, the more I realized that my belief was based on my label as a “Christian young lady.” My belief was based on uniting with my mother against my stepfather.
I now consider myself a secular humanist, someone who believes that there is no supernatural power and that as humans, we have to rely on one another for support, encouragement and love. Looking at religious ideas and asking questions, thinking and talking and then finally coming to the realization that I was a secular humanist—that was not the difficult part. Breaking away from the expectations and dysfunctions of my family of origin has proven to be the real and ongoing challenge.
__________________
BECCA McGOWAN is a first grade teacher. She holds a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley and a graduate teaching certificate from UCLA. She lives with her husband Dale and three children in Atlanta, Georgia.
the legend of squishsquish
“Can I read you something from my Monster Museum book?”
I said sure, not knowing that we were launching a mini-obsession that so far has lasted a week. Delaney (6) flipped to the back of the book, which offers a short “bio” of each monster mentioned in the bad kiddie poetry that fills the rest of the book.
“‘BIGFOOT,’” she read. “‘Called Squishsquish in North America…’ Squishsquish?”
“Oh. Sasquatch.”
“You know about Bigfoot?” she asked, mighty impressed.
“A little,” I said. “Keep going. I want to hear.”
“‘Called Sasquatch in North America and Yeti in Asia. A huge, hairy, shy creature. Bigfoot prefers mountains, valleys, and cool weather. Many people claim to have seen and even photographed Squish…Squishkatch or Yeti or his footprints, but so far, no one has had a conversation with him.’ Haha! That’s funny.”
Each biographical entry has a little cartoon picture of the beast in question, with the exception of Bigfoot. We apparently know what a banshee looks like, and The Blob, and a poltergeist. But when it comes to Bigfoot, they simply put a question mark. I’m willing to bet it was the question mark that drew her attention to Bigfoot.
“If people took pictures,” she asked, “why is there a question mark?”
“I don’t know.”
“So is he real?”
“Some people think so, and some people think it’s a fake. Wanna see the pictures?”
We Googled up a few choice photos. Delaney gasped, launching into an enthralled monologue as I took furtive notes:
“It would be so interesting if Bigfoot was real. I really wonder if he is. It would be so cool if he was real! But maybe the picture is somebody in a gorilla suit. And maybe somebody went out with a big footprint maker and made footprints in the woods. Or maybe it’s real. But I’ll bet if he is real, he’s nice.”
“Why?”
“Because if he was mean, he’d be attacking people, and then we’d know he exists! But…there can’t be a person that big in a costume, so it seems like he has to be real somehow. Even the tallest person isn’t that tall.”
“So do you think it’s probably real, or probably not?”
She paused and thunk. “I’m not sure. I’m really, really not sure. I’ll bet scientists are trying to figure out. It’s just so cool to think about. It makes you curious.”
Yesterday she had a friend over—the pseudonymous Kaylee of a long-ago post—and dove right into the quest as I quietly transcribed the conversation on my laptop:
DELANEY: Have you ever heard of Bigfoot?
KAYLEE: No. What’s Bigfoot?
D: You have got to see this. You have got to see this. [Types BIGFOOT into Google.] Look, there it is. It’s called Bigfoot, but some people say Squishsquish.
K: What is it?!
D, with didactic precision: Some people say it’s like a gorilla man who lives in the forest. But you don’t have to worry. He wouldn’t be in any forest near us. Some people think it’s not even real.
K: So that’s Bigfoot??
D: Well it’s a picture.
K: So Bigfoot is real!
D: Nope, we don’t know that for sure. (Reads from website.) “An appeal to protect Bigfoot as an in-danger species has also been made to the U.S. Congress.”
K, (reading ahead): Look, it says right here, “Bigfoot is not real.” So he’s not real.
D: But we don’t know for sure. That’s just what the person says who has that website. That doesn’t make it for sure.
[Laney switches to image search, pulling up a full page of yetis.]
K: I hope it isn’t real. That would be so scary.
D: I hope it is. It would be so cool!
K: (looking at one photo): Does he only live in snow?
D: No look, there are pictures with no snow. It seems like he would hibernate. I wonder what he would eat.
K: Probably people.
D: I just wonder everything about him. Doesn’t it just make you so curious?
K: No. It makes me freaky.
I have a favorite particular moment in that dialogue–I’ll let you guess. But my favorite thing overall is Laney’s Saganistic approach to knowledge. Just as Carl Sagan wanted more than anything for intelligent life to exist elsewhere in the universe, Laney really wants Bigfoot to be real. It would, in both cases, be “so cool.” But that has no effect on her belief, or his, that the beloved possibility is real. Neither can see much joy or point in pretending that a wish makes it so. Both are happy to wait for the much greater thrill of knowledge, of the discovery that something wonderful turns out to be not just cool, but true.
the mix
You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught
____________________
From the musical South Pacific
Explain to me if you will why I wrote this post, then tabled it for ten days, then paused over the delete key before finally posting.
Our three summer family reunions were terrific, especially for the kids, who have discovered or re-discovered no fewer than 50 cousins of various degrees of remove. Better yet, these cousins are good kids, enjoyable kids, funny and friendly and loving kids.
And ohhh so very religious. Which is fine, of course.
Becca and I are the dolphins in the tuna nets of our respective families. Most all of the relations on all three sides are not only churchgoing but fish-wearingly, abstinence-swearingly, cross-bearingly so. The fact that most of them are also genuinely delightful to be around — funny and friendly and loving — serves as a nice slap on my wrist any time I find myself lumping together all things and people religious.
How can I not love it when my twelve-year-old second cousin, working on a leather bracelet, asks, “Mister Dale, how do you spell ‘Colossians’?” (I nailed it.) Or when Becca, watching another young cousin making a wooden picture frame with the letters JIMS across the top, innocently asked, “Is that for sombody named Jim?” only to be told patiently that “it stands for ‘Jesus Is My Savior’.” It’s sweet. It’s lovely. Creepy-lovely, perhaps…but that’s a kind of lovely, isn’t it?
When it comes to assessing the many conservative religious folks in my life, though, there’s a complication, one that still makes me dizzy after all these years. It was captured by (of all people) Larry Flynt, who wrote in the LA Times about his unlikely friendship with Jerry Falwell after the televangelist’s death last year:
My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.
The same weird dichotomy is present in many of the deeply religious folks I know. Many are just plain good in word and deed, and I love having their influence in my kids’ lives. But many others, including some I like so much I could burst, will be in the midst of a perfectly normal conversation, then suddenly spew bile or rank ignorance — often without changing expression — before turning back to the weather or the casserole.
It’s not a case of some believers being lovely and others being nasty. That I could sort out. It’s much more confusing. Like Larry said of Jerry, they’re often the same people. But in the case of folks I know, it reveals itself in the opposite order of Flynt’s description. I liked them from the beginning, then was blindsided by the nastiness.
The conversation at one reunion found its way to gays and lesbians, and a cousin — one of my favorites, a deeply religious college graduate and the pick of the litter — suddenly said, “What kills me is when they say [homosexuality] shouldn’t be treated. Well if that’s the case, why treat schizophrenia? Why treat cancer?”
All heads nodded but mine. I was searching for the perfect line. Finally it came. “And what about the lefthanders?” I said. “And those got-dam redheads, roaming the streets untreated!”
They laughed, not quite getting it, and the topic quickly moved on to (if I remember correctly) boat motors.
I find myself related by blood or marriage to several ministers, including a couple who are among my favorite people on Earth, open and honest and deeply humane, without a shred of pretense. There’s another of whom I’m very fond as well, but in him we encounter The Mix. A quickish wit, he spends most of his time trying to make other people laugh. But when the conversation turned to the war and someone had the gall to mention the deaths of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, he erupted:
“Oh innocent civilians, innocent bystanders, boo hoo! First of all, they’re not so innocent. Second of all, this is war! If you are my enemy, I’m not gonna shoot you in the leg, I’m not gonna shoot you in the arm…I’m going to put one right between your eyes. I’m going to annihilate you. And the sooner I do it, the sooner the world will be safe for God’s people.”
Several kids were sitting in earshot, getting themselves carefully taught. I was livid. “Now there’s a man of God!’ I said. “Hallelujah!”
Beloved Relation looked me in the eye, momentarily wordless, then decided to play it for comedy. “Just like the old days!” he bellowed. “Kill a Gook for Jesus! Kill a Commie for Christ!”
Nice.
Anybody wish to guess the denomination that would have a minister playing so fast and loose with the Sixth Commandment, not to mention the Beatitudes? Yes, you in the back, Reverend Falwell — what’s your guess?
I listened to two high school teachers bemoaning their “lazy Mexican” students. “It’s like an entire culture of unaccountability,” one said. “And if I say a word about it, I’m a racist!” The other couldn’t agree more. “Joo can’t say dat to me, joo ees raceest,” she mocked, and they laughed. I also heard them both bemoaning the posture, attitude, and irresponsibility of their non-Mexican students, but in those cases, it’s because they’re teenagers. For the Mexican kids, the same behaviors are attributed to Mexicanness. One group of sinners, in other words, is unforgiven.
On the ride home from one of the reunions, Erin told of a cousin she idolizes saying “I hate Democrats!” then informing the rest of the group in a whisper that Obama is “a Muslim.”
My kids are plenty old enough to pick up on these things. Connor was nine when he asked, “Why does [Beloved Relation X] hate A-rabs so much?” with the requisite long ‘A’. In answering such questions, I find myself struggling more than anything with The Mix, trying hard to emphasize the positive qualities of religion, to keep them away from the broad brush, to remember that we are all a Mix, to not to create my own category of unforgiven sinners. Again — many of the religious folks in their lives are wonderful, kind, and ethical. But I can also say, with honest regret, that the greatest poison my kids hear comes from fervently religious people they know and love.
Why is that? (he asked rhetorically). And why am I so damned hesitant to point it out?
The humanistic hell that is Norway
As we pull together Connor’s coming of age process for the coming year, one country keeps popping its blonde head into the frame–Norway. No surprise: Norway is among the least theistic countries on Earth and has the longest continuous history of humanist coming-of-age ceremonies. I mentioned this in passing late last year:
One of the most marvelous and successful [humanist coming-of-age] programs in the world is the Humanist Confirmation program in Norway. According to the website of the Norwegian Humanist Association, 10,000 fifteen-year-old Norwegians each spring “go through a course where they discuss life stances and world religions, ethics and human sexuality, human rights and civic duties. At the end of the course the participants receive a diploma at a ceremony including music, poetry and speeches.” They are thereby confirmed not into atheism, but into the humanist values that underlie all aspects of civil society, including religion.
As for Norway itself, I could go on and on. It is among the nations with the lowest rates of crime and poverty while topping the developed world in generosity and nearly all standards of living. Yet fewer than 10 percent of Norwegians attend church regularly.
I’ll let Russell’s Teapot take it on home:
[CAVEAT LECTOR: The cartoonist has overreached a bit here. Sixty-eight percent of the Norwegian population self-identifies as nontheistic. A much smaller percentage (around 10 percent) self-identify as atheists. Hat tip to MoL reader Ellen!]
guessing games
There is a game that my girls (10 and 6) play at great length. One of them puts her hands over her eyes and asks, “Are my eyes open or closed?”
The guesser stares at the back of her sister’s hands. “Uhhhh…open!” at which point the first one pulls her hands away to reveal, most often, closed eyes.
I hate this game.
I hate it because even if everyone is rigorously honest (pfft), there is literally no way to know in the first place. The guess is necessarily, definitively wild. The only honest answer is “I have no idea, go away.”
Once in a while, forgetting my opinion on the matter, one of them will turn the latest version on me. “Daddy,” Laney will say, hands behind her back, “guess whether my fingers are crossed!”
“Go far away.”
“Just guess!”
Just guess. I only like educated guessing. I like looking at scraps of information and trying to tease out the answer to a puzzle. That’s fun. But in this case she’s essentially saying Take a random stab at it, based on nothing. Say the first thing that comes to mind. Go with your gut. Reach out with your feeeelings. Use the Force, Luke. I don’t wanna.
As Malcolm Gladwell illustrates in the fascinating (though subtitularly offputting) Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, what we call “going with your gut” can actually be effective when there are data. We often make decisions in a blink that turn out to be informed by evidence that we perceived but didn’t consciously process. Gladwell goes to great lengths to note that what we call “intuition” is not magic — it’s regular old cognition, just quick and subconscious.
I usually end up playing along with the girls, just to be Mr. Daddy Fun Fun, but I quit after two or three rounds because the whole idea of pretending I have a clue when I have none irritates me. It just does.
Becca went through a period of playing the same game when pregnant with each of our kids. In the dark of our room, three minutes after the light went out, her voice would suddenly pipe up: “Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?”
“Well of course.”
“Which one?”
“Oh, which one? No idea.”
“Just guess, silly!”
“…”
I guess I didn’t care enough about being Mr. Husband Fun Fun to play along. She got her revenge, though. The girls learned the game in utero.
souls of gold
- July 23, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids
15
[Get ready for a short flurry of posts. I’ll be off the net for five days next week, so I’m posting daily for the next five days to get some ideas off my sketchpad. Read at your leisure (or not). Sometime in early August I’ll launch the New Look.]
Having rhapsed waxsodic about my boy and my wife recently, I wanted to give my girls a big shout-out before moving on.
This may border on the sappy from the outside — my meter is indeed twitching — but I was moved by a recent loving gesture from Erin (10) and Delaney (6). This may be in part because of the occasional emails I get, weeping over the fate of my children, whose religionless lives are assumed to be cold and unemotional. A recent message mourned my kids’ lost opportunity to “develop they’re [sic] souls.” Like “sacred,” the word “soul” has at least two common meanings: (1) an immortal essence, or (2) a rich, emotional inner life. Removing religion may remove the idea of immortality, but (as you in the choir no doubt know) it has no effect on the richness of a person’s emotional life, on his or her ability to feel, empathize, love, and discover meaning.
My girls recently demonstrated the depth of their lovely second-definition souls as Becca and I celebrated our 17th anniversary last Sunday, two days after the family went to Six Flags.
“Stay out of the family room, stay out of the family room!” shrieked Delaney excitedly, waving her hands to block us on the stairs. We dutifully detoured into the dining room and sat, waiting for further instructions.
Five minutes later, we got the nod. “Mr and Mrs. McGowan,” Erin said, “come right this way.”
In the middle of the family room sat two chairs, one in front of the other, each with two strings depending from the back and another across the seat. Next to the chairs, stuck on a broom handle, was this sign:
We understood immediately.
During our day at Six Flags, Becca and I kept trying to ride a rollercoaster called the Great American Scream Machine. First I chickened out. When I finally decided I’d do it, the line was way too long. Finally we decided we’d go at the end of the day as our very last ride.
But as we headed that way, Becca and I realized that the girls (who had no interest in the Scream Machine) wouldn’t get another ride in if we did that. So we scotched our plans for a mutual G.A.S.M. and went instead to Splashwater Falls.
On the drive home, Erin looked out the window, pensively.
“What are you thinking about, B?” I asked.
“I feel bad that you guys didn’t get to go on the Scream Machine.”
“Yeah,” Laney added.
We waved it off, thanked them for thinking about us, assured them that the Falls was even more fun. But when we saw the sign, we knew they hadn’t bought it and had turned that karmic wheel to set things right.
They tied us is with the strings. “Okay everybody, here goes!!” they yelled, then shook our chairs and leaned them back (somehow) for the big uphill. “Clack clack clack clack clack!”
“Hold on, here’s the first hill, woohooooooooo!” They slammed our chairs forward to the floor. Erin reached over and switched on a table fan to blow in our faces. We threw our hands in the air and screamed. They shook the hell out of our chairs and screamed along with us.
At last it was over. They untied us and wished us a happy anniversary. Honestly, surrounded by golden souls like that, how could we not have one?
introducing connor mcgowan
- July 21, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids
- 27
Connor McGowan is a young man on the cusp of thirteen, living in Atlanta with his two sisters and his parents, one of whom am I. As my regular readers will know, I am immensely proud and honored to be his dad. He is intelligent, creative, funny, and deeply kind.
When he turns thirteen ten days from now, Connor will begin a year-long coming-of-age program of our own design. I’ll write about it as we go.
Even more exciting is the fact that Connor has now launched his own blog called THE WIDE SCREEN. He would be delighted if y’all would surf over there, take a look at his first posts and jot a comment or two.
BUT FIRST, by way of introduction, I thought I’d share some of his writing. Below is a short speech Connor wrote for a seventh grade assignment, one that shows his fascination with “personal improbability,” a.k.a. how amazingly unlikely was his birth.
Why Me? Why Not?
by Connor McGowan
Everyone, at some time in their childhood, has an image of themselves in the future. I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a construction worker. I want to be… These are the words of millions of children around the world. As the comedian George Burns put it, “I look to the future ’cause that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.” But before we look to the future, we must look to the past. It’s the events of the past that decide who we are going to be, what our characteristics are, and even whether we are going to exist at all.
On April 23, 1862, a 19-year-old Confederate soldier was shot through the neck by a Yankee bullet. He lay on the battlefield, bleeding profusely, then was found and taken to a Yankee field hospital as a prisoner of war. The doctors were able to stop the bleeding just in time to save his life. If the bullet had entered his neck one inch further to the left, he would have died. I’m glad he didn’t, because if he had, I wouldn’t be giving this speech. That nineteen-year-old boy just happened to be my great-great-great grandfather.
Every one of us has a past full of moments where our ancestors came an inch away from death. But death is not the only thing that could have erased me, or any one of us. Even small, everyday decisions and events can have a huge impact on the future. Few people think about the amazingly small chance of them ever existing. Countless things had to go perfectly right all along the line. What if my dad married his first girlfriend instead of my mom? I wouldn’t have been born. What if my grandparents never met? I wouldn’t have been born. What if the marriage proposal my great-grandpa sent to my great-grandma got lost in the mail, and she married the mailman instead? You know the answer. And this goes on and on for thousands of generations and millions of people, all of them doing just what they had to do for me to be.
Now here I am, making decisions of my own, all of which will affect generations and generations of my descendants. When my family moved from Minneapolis to Atlanta, it almost certainly changed the person I will eventually marry, which means countless people who would have been born will not be, and others who would not have been born, will be. Even the smaller decisions will have a big impact — where I go to college, what job I’ll have, and whether I’m careful crossing the street. Some will change who I am. Some will change what I do.
So why me? Because of all those millions of millions of people making millions and millions of choices and taking chances, I am here, giving this speech. I am standing at the neck of an hourglass. Above me are my millions and millions of ancestors all leading to me. Below me are my descendants. My ancestors are frozen in place. But, as I make choices and take chances, my descendants are constantly changing.
Now even though we are the result of infinite decisions, and we have been able to take part in existence, it doesn’t last forever. But that doesn’t make me unlucky. As Richard Dawkins said, “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
So why me? Why not?
______________________
(The hourglass thing just kills me. Entirely his own metaphor.)
So pop over to THE WIDE SCREEN and say hey to my boy!
i’ll give you something to scream about
- July 19, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, fear, My kids
- 16
I like to watch other people in horror.
–Delaney McGowan, age six, smiling while watching screaming riders on the GOLIATH rollercoaster at Six Flags Over Georgia
Now I know for a fact that she doesn’t enjoy genuine suffering in others, but Linky and I both like to watch other lunatics in the grip of relatively benign and self-selected terrors – ten story drops on a coaster or a bungee, for example, things neither she nor I would do ourselves, thangyavurrymush.
But my daughter hasn’t yet noticed the thing that really puzzles me: they aren’t actually “in horror.” They are, most of them, thoroughly enjoying themselves.
I don’t get it.
I don’t get it for two reasons. The first is that I don’t understand how one of our greatest naturally-selected fears – the fear of falling, of which rollercoasting is a (barely) controlled simulacrum – got itself converted to one of our greatest thrills.
Sure, I can rationalize it – something about confronting death and emerging victorious, I guess. But that’s neocortical stuff. When I find myself (usually as a result of succumbing to the shamelessly repeated lie, “Come on, it’ll be fun!!” from my spawn) plunging down a near-vertical drop of ten stories at freeway speeds, my neocortex is huddled in a corner of my skull, wetting itself. The limbic system naturally grabs the wheel, screaming something about the fast-approaching jungle floor.
It’s not that I’m not a thrillseeker. I yearn to be thrilled. We all do. The question is what thrills you. I happen to be thrilled by perfect comedic timing, a blow-your-hair-back argument on any side of any issue, long sightlines over water or wilderness, mutually great sex, devastating musical harmony, unforeseen movie plot twists, Connor’s inventiveness and Delaney’s machine-gun laugh. I can sometimes even get my mind clear enough to be thrilled to be alive.
Which is exactly why simulated death-defiance makes me really, really unhappy.
I don’t call it a phobia, since “phobia” is defined as an irrational fear. A paralyzing fear of Regis Philbin or of macaroni might be irrational. Fear of death, or of things that could lead to it, is not.1
Cut to a speedboat coursing over the Lake of the Ozarks last week. (It’s a family reunion that includes a half dozen sporty cousins of mine who water-ski, Seadoo, skydive, speedboat, parasail, and just generally court risk as avidly as I avoid it. I’m in my forty-fifth year of hearing “Aw, come on!” from them and feeling like a poodle in a dogsled team.) From the back of the boat runs a rope, taut and twanging like a string on a washtub bass. At the end of the rope is an inflated tube, across which is sprawled my thirteen-year-old son and his younger cousin.
The boat makes a quick turn and the tube is sent skittering sidelong over the wake. Though it’s been years, I have done this, so I know that moment. If the turn is fast enough and the water rough enough, the tube will gradually tip, then vibrate, and finally tumble wildly like a flipped coin, throwing the rider or riders into the water at 40 mph. If you’re lucky, you end up in the path of a drunk hillbilly on a Seadoo, and death comes quickly.
Okay, I’m projecting.
But here’s the thing. I looked back at the face of my boy, right in the moment of maximum instability, the very moment when my own face would be a mask of concentrated unhappiness, and he was smiling. No no, not just smiling: his face looked to be in danger of splitting wide open. At the exact moment I would be least happy, his joy was positively orgasmic.
Why?
I’ve always figured my dad’s death when I was thirteen had something to do with my risk-aversion. I certainly lost all illusions of my immortality that day. But I’ve since learned that PET scan research is turning up two very different neurological responses to danger. It seems that you are either wired to love or hate the experience of risk. So maybe I’ve always been wired to hate it. The question remains: why did natural selection endow anyone, much less a sizable whack of humanity, with such a rabid taste for it?
Yesterday was another risk-immersion experience for me: a family trip to Six Flags. We divided into two groups by wiring: Connor, a friend, and Connor’s awesome (and risk-okiedokie) Aunt Beth went one way…
…while Becca, her mom, the girls and I went another.
In our final minutes at the park, Erin and Delaney suddenly decided it was time for a bit of terror and pointed to Splashwater Falls. It’s the simplest of all log flumes. No futzing around with zigzag courses through faux mountains and animatronic mining camps. They simply take you to the top of a 50-foot water drop and send you hastily down.
“You sure about this one?” I asked Delaney, who has a history of screaming for release from rollercoasters in the seconds before departure.
“Yep!”
“Okay! I’m psyched!” I actually was. For some reason I love water rides, no matter how insane.
It was on the incredibly long uphill, during that unmistakable ratcheting for which you know you’ll shortly pay, that she started to lose it. Nooooooooooo, she moaned, then began sobbing hard. Noooohohohohohohoho…
I put my arm around her. “You know we’re safe, right?” I said. No answer. She was now no-kidding terrified. “You won’t even believe how quick it goes,” I offered, knowing that I could only have sounded like the ax-wielding executioner whispering to Anne Boleyn.
We left the top, dropped like a rock, and I felt – there was no mistaking it – a genuine thrill. We hit the bottom, sending a magnificent wall of water over the crowd on the bridge. I was laughing like an idiot.
Then I remembered. I turned to Delaney, who was soaked to the skin. She slowly turned to look at me, her eyes intense.
“Again,” she said. “Again.”
__________________________
1Even though the “irrational fear of death” has its own name, thanatophobia, it shouldn’t.
