It’s getting to be high season for fall conferences, meetings, and book launches. Pet peeve: events that start with an announcement of disappointment that so few people chose to attend. What a downer! The only people to hear it are those who did show up. Low attendance is hardly their fault. The message is that they don’t count, or at best they are insufficient.

​You don’t have to believe everything happens for a purpose in order to suggest that the number in the room or on screen is exactly the right number, with exactly the right people. Make it part of your quickly revised plan. Move the chairs closer. Adopt a more conversational style. Take advantage of  the intimacy instead of bemoaning it. Dinner with close friends can be as meaningful as a banquet. When attendees feel honored to get up close and enjoy individual attention for their questions or comments, they’re more likely to leave on a high.

Duty is not a word to fill me with joy and sunshine. Like work, it conjures up doing what’s obligatory rather than fun. Granted, I dislike some duties and enjoy others; the same holds for work. But as a guiding life principle, duty—or dharma—attracts me far less than love and compassion, or even curiosity.

I’ve been watching a lecture series on mythologies, including the Bhagavad Gita. In it, Krishna teaches a prince about dharma, the imperative to do one’s duty according to one’s place in society, without investment in the results. Our related “let it go” and “accept the things I cannot change” remind me how little my strivings can achieve. Dharma goes one step further: Do the right thing without striving toward any goal. Just do it.

My vote won’t swing the upcoming election, but voting is my dharma as a citizen. When my close friend pleads for advice I’m sure she won’t follow, my dharma as a friend is to treat her with love and respect. Instead of debating whether I’m bound by a promise to one now dead who won’t know, to stay bound is my dharma as part of a society that honors promises.

Of course, results do matter. I wouldn’t call doing laundry or dishes part of my dharma if they never come clean. And it will matter how the election comes out, and whether my friend finds comfort in her troubles. Stress hormones of caring can energize and motivate. But tight shoulders and knots in the stomach can also paralyze. I’m little use to anyone when I’m paralyzed by anticipating ends beyond my control. I wouldn’t choose dharma as a guiding life principle, but at the moment it’s a useful tool to have in my toolbox.

Image: Krishna and Arjun on the chariot, Mahabharata, 18th-19th century, India.

Last week we switched the thermostat from “cool” to “heat.” Not because the equinox is behind us, not because the calendar says it’s almost October, but because the house was cold.

In Chicago, landlords must ensure habitable spaces are at least 68 degrees warm from September 15 till June 1, or “heat season.” If you’re chilly Sept 12, tough luck. Last I knew, the U.S. Army required soldiers to change between summer and winter uniforms on specified dates, weather be damned.

Individuals and cultures have different preferences between rigidity/order and flexibility/chaos. Some parents tuck toddlers into bed at eight, others when they act overtired and cranky. But an additional factor shapes whether turn-of-the-year shifts depend more on calendar or weather.

How close is the person who reaps the benefit to the one who bears the cost or risk? If you swap out summer for winter wear in your closet, no one else cares. On the other hand, the landlord who pays the heating bill may never have met the shivering tenant. The same question fits non-seasonal issues too, but that’s for another day.

Who doesn’t crave life balance? Enough to do and not too much, productivity and leisure, human touch and peaceful solitude? Able to walk the tightrope without falling off to either side? The equal balance of night and day at the autumn equinox conjures up this dream we pursue but rarely quite achieve.

A younger woman once asked me, with reference to work and family and volunteerism and the rest, if it’s possible to have it all. My response: Yes, but not all at the same time.

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
     The garden is growing dark.
     The stars are shining.
     Let us, then, bow our heads to the earth's rhythms
     And acknowledge the wisdom of change.

Perhaps the lesson of the equinox is not to stay upright on the tightrope but to find ease with falling off. The time of equal day and night is very brief. Most days are longer or shorter. Joy and grief are warp and woof of life’s tapestry. “Let us, then, bow our heads to the earth’s rhythms and acknowledge the wisdom of change.”

Image: Five dancing women, 1338-1410, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, reproduced under Creative Commons licence CC-BY-NC 4.0. 

I woke in the middle of the night from one of those rare, profound dreams that answers a question that’s been pestering for weeks. Eager to save the solution, I found a pencil on the bedside table and scribbled key words on the back of a nearby Kleenex box.

“Aha!” moments of insight arrive seemingly out of the blue. A recent article in Communications Psychology defines such a moment as “a special type of problem-solving process where a problem-solver achieves a sudden and complete mental restructuring of a problem, accompanied by a distinct rush of satisfaction, surprise, and confidence.” Such epiphanies have changed the lives of religious mystics. According to legend, the ancient Greek thinker Archimedes got so excited by his realization about floating bodies that he jumped out of his bath and ran naked down the street, shouting “Eureka!” (“I have found it!”)

The morning after the dream, I forgot my eureka moment and went on about my day.

Psychologists suggest “Aha!” moments, if not supernatural, arise from subconscious brainwork based on previous experience, beliefs, and sensory input. They feel significant and true. To the extent they can be measured objectively, they are usually accurate or lead to positive results.

​Usually, but not always. Throwing away the empty Kleenex box months after the dream, I noticed my handwriting in pencil on the back. It said, “One apple is worth six bananas.”

Image: Anonymous 16th-century woodcut of Archimedes' eureka moment.

You may know this is the Year of the Dragon. Not attentive to the Chinese zodiac, I wasn’t aware of it until a couple of weeks ago. Now old memories surface. Savoring dragon imagery in North American Chinatowns. Playing Dungeons and Dragons with old-fashioned graph paper and pencil. Watching dragonflies hover above the pond, and dragon kites soar into the sky. Singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon” by the campfire. Reading tales of King Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon.

In general, a dragon (from Greek drakon and Latin draco, “large serpent”) is a giant, mythical reptile with long sharp claws and fangs, four legs, a long tail, often with wings and horns and fiery breath. Comprising all the traits of great predators built onto an enormous serpent, it was powerful enough to give protection (as in China and Wales), threaten enemies (as on the bow of Viking ships), or devastate the countryside until slain by Saint George or some other valiant hero.

The puzzle about dragons, to me, is why such similar scaled beasts took shape in so many disconnected parts of the globe—including places that don’t have crocodiles, iguanas, or traces of Tyrannosaurus Rex. There are theories but no consensus. One that intrigues me lies in the human genome. Although people of many lands faced more danger from bears than snakes, the opposite was true in Africa where their early ancestors evolved. Fear of snakes (and spiders, and heights) promoted survival. Like monkeys, humans are born with an instinctive fear of snakes. Small wonder such fear became the basis for fantastical super-predators around the world.

​Images (all cropped): (left) Aztec era stone sculpture of feathered serpent, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; (middle) Drawing from original gypsum bas-relief, from beside door in Babylonian temple, now in British Museum; (right) Carving on choir stalls in Chester Cathedral, England, 1380.

Age-old tradition treats reason and emotion as opposites. Whether in balance or in tension, they get paired with other dualisms: masculine and feminine, sun and moon, yang and yin, sophisticated and primitive, left brain and right brain. René Descartes famously wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” But if you only think, without also feeling, decisions are impossible. Logic may explain how to pursue a goal, but it can’t discern which goal to pursue. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.”

Damasio calls emotions an integrated set of rapid bodily changes that evolved for survival in response to danger or opportunity. In front of a charging tiger or truck, our bodies prepare to fight or flee. Our muscles tense, our pulse and blood pressure rise, our pupils dilate, our breath becomes rapid, all before our brains can formulate that we’re afraid. Later, as time allows, we can reason whether the danger is real or whether a reward is worth the risk.

“Life is not a series of calculus problems. Life is about movement,” New York Times columnist David Brooks writes. “Emotions guide the navigation system.” To teach children the alphabet but ignore story characters’ motives misses the boat. To estimate potential based on test scores alone is to overlook emotional judgment. To build a machine that processes data a zillion times faster than humans doesn’t mean it will replace us. To pit reason against feeling is self-defeating. We need both, working in tandem.

​Images: Symbols of reason and emotion.

Late one summer evening decades ago, at a family camp after the children were asleep, a dozen adult campers went skinny-dipping off the dock. Happier near water than in it, I sat on the dock, leaning against a post, drifting in and out, soaking up the voices and the warm night air. At peace with the world.

The next morning one of the swimmers accosted me. “How dare you sit in judgment on us? Who do you think you are, disapproval written all over your face?” Huh? What’s the self-defense for seeming to show an attitude so different from what you were feeling?

Humans have this precious, inborn capacity to perceive what other people are feeling. As with other skills, it’s on a spectrum. Along with being somewhat face blind, I suspect I’m below average on this. Others grasp friends’ unspoken thoughts with near-perfect empathy or see with confidence when someone is lying.

And still other people go overboard, reading more into a facial expression or a casual gesture than is actually there. Please, before you decide my blank face means I feel grumpy or resentful or bored, go ahead and ask. And please, have the courtesy to believe my answer.

Image: Wikipedia, “Faces.” What are these two thinking?

Building a climate-resilient polio-free world is a technical brief issued last month by the World Health Organization on behalf of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Having been involved with polio eradication for forty-odd years, I wondered what a public health perspective might add to the daily headlines of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and storms.

Case in point: Pakistan. In 2022, warming air and ocean set off a sequence of drought, record-breaking monsoon rains, and meltwater from Himalayan glaciers. Catastrophic floods from May to October displaced nearly eight million people. At the peak, almost a third of the country was under water. Roads, bridges, and entire villages were destroyed. In the health sector:

• Masses of people wading through wastewater spread cholera and polio.
• Nearly 1,500 health facilities were devastated and nonfunctional.
• Displaced health workers couldn’t get vaccines or medicines to their patients.
• Destruction of crops and livestock created a severe food shortage.

Globally, rising temperatures are expected to cause a quarter million deaths a year between 2030 and 2050 from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, dengue, and heat stress. Longer, hotter summers mean more disease-bearing mosquitoes, which kill more humans than does any other animal. I tend to think of health and climate as two important but mostly unrelated issues. Not so.

Image: Cattail Mosquito (Coquillettidia perturbans), widespread carrier of West Nile virus and other diseases. Photo by David McCorquodale.

Words shift meaning. Some, like Methodist and queer, start as slurs and later get adopted by the groups they concern. Some, such as silly, sink from positive to pejorative. By the time I heard woke as an adjective within the past decade, its senses had expanded from neutral to cautionary, admiring, mistakenly-would-be supportive, or insulting, depending on who’s saying it and why.

Woke has long been a literal form of awake in African American vernacular. By the 1930s, stay woke was also a metaphor for remaining vigilant and alert. Singer-songwriter Lead Belly used the term after recording a song about the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black teens wrongly convicted of raping white women. You’ve got to be a little careful when you go down South, he told a radio interviewer. “Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.”

Staying woke broadened to mean challenging systems of racial injustice. In 1940, after Black coal miners in West Virginia went on strike for pay equal to that of whites, a Black union leader said, “We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.” Not until decades later did I encounter woke in mainstream media. It burst into public awareness with the Black Lives Matter movement after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. Merriam-Webster added woke to its dictionary in 2017 as U.S. slang for “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

Perhaps inevitably, some whites coopted woke for their own purposes, twisting its connotations in the process. Opponents may use it to attack progressive ideas in general or to issue a racist dog whistle. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said, “We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.” Aspiring allies may mistakenly appropriate this adjective born of specifically Black experience. As a white woman, I have never felt truly threatened when pulling out my cell phone or stopped for speeding. When police questioned my kids for riding bikes after curfew, I never feared they wouldn’t come home alive. I’ll strive to honor woke but I’ll never claim it for myself.

​Images: (left) singer-songwriter Lead Belly; (right) then-Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, 2018.