(Written by a young American woman on a fellowship in India)

About a month ago, my house was broken in to as we slept. I had a friend in town that week, and she was sleeping in my room with me. She stayed up until 4am working, so they had a narrow window during which to come. We think one or two men came in through our balcony (jiggling the lock open), and then just rifled through all our stuff. They took my iPhone, my friend’s iPhone and laptop, my roommate’s iPhone and iPad, running shoes, DSLR…etc. Pretty impressive haul, I have to say. And they were kind enough to leave credit cards and passports.

It was jarring, threw off our whole week. But at the end of the whole thang, it was okay. I was less scared than I expected, and didn’t really feel threatened by the fact that it had happened. It took a long while to believe that it actually happened but I was never really that scared. More than anything, it was a reminder of my privilege and my status as a very noticeable outsider. Everyone in my neighborhood knows who I am and where I live. They probably know my schedules better than I do. They know that I have money – perhaps not much by American standards, but here I’m rich – and that I probably have nice stuff. And they’re right. Spending the money to replace the phone was an easy decision for me, yet it’s an amount that’s inconceivable for many people I work with. Nuts.

Anyway. Consequence of this has been much less connection to the internet, facebook, news, email, friends, texts. At first it was weird, and on occasion I’ve longed for it, but generally it’s been amazing. What a difference it makes to have to at least see where you are, instead of burying your face in your iPhone. Part of me wants to stay without a smartphone forever. It’s just so liberating (well, once I got used to it). There’s so much more time for calmness in my mind, for healthy, slow consideration of myself. Not the frenetic “OMG am I doing enough” that happens when perusing social media. Through it all, I’ve realized more and more that I’ve never really defined myself or my goals or my thoughts on my own terms. I’m always comparing to friends, their Facebook pages, their blogs, strangers’ blogs detailing their years in the peace corps in wherever. As of late I’ve had less of that “other” in my head, and it’s been wonderful.

Not having the intrusive “other,” or the dependence on those cursed little red notifications as validation for my “meaning” in the world / in other people’s lives gave that even more room to grow. I have to sit with my thoughts when I’m commuting (solid 3 hours a day, during which I usually can’t even read because of motion sickness/darkness) or flying/traveling. It’s been really good for me. Instead of stewing in self-doubt (often engendered by whatever I see on fb/instagram; or prompted by a lack of people texting/emailing/etc me), I’ve been dreaming about the future. In part that’s because I am so excited to return to some comforts – this has been hard, this India thing – but in part I believe it’s because I am seeing a future that is exciting and that just has me as the sole requirement in it. Not a specific man (boy), or career, or friend, or city. Just me. If I’d had my phone the past weeks, I think I would have allowed my mind to be pulled in a million different directions by whatever app/notification/fb-update/etc. I saw. I lack the self-discipline (at the moment) to stop my mind from running down those paths. Not having them available is absolutely wonderful for letting me truly consider the things I want, not what I’m supposed to want. It’s also allowed me to really flesh those out. Having less option to compare my present / desired future with those of others has further let me feel that my realities and dreams are valid and “cool” just because they’re mine. They don’t need the stamp of approval from someone else. Again, not to say that I don’t wander down the paths – I have wifi at home and usually at office – but I do it less often, and give myself more space to be self-centered (in, for now, a good way).
I feel like these are things that I should already have learned and internalized, but they’re not. I did “know” them in the past, as Pintrest-worthy quotes reaffirming my uniqueness and validity of my dreams, but I didn’t believe them. I didn’t discover them myself, or actually feel them to be true. I really hope that I can keep the feelings in my head.

Couples therapy is notoriously difficult, although when successful, it is tremendously rewarding. Many elements go into making it the most challenging of all therapeutic modalities, but the overarching one is probably the fact that for each of us “I, me, mine” are the most important concepts in any language. Even though it is rather easy to be giving, generous, and otherwise selfless in the first flush of romantic love, the generosity can be difficult to sustain over time, and its opposite, self-insistence, creeps into our day-to-day interactions. Once the passion of the early stages gives way to the inevitable awareness of finding oneself tied to an imperfect being, quite different in his or her fundamental vision from our own, disappointment and resentment may start to blind us to the beauty and richness of the other. This is not necessarily sad or destructive; however, how we conduct ourselves once the honeymoon ends, and it’s day 1 of the rest of our lives, makes all the difference.
Over the years, I have accumulated some experience of couplehood, through observation of others, clinical experience, and relationships of my own. Here is a quick and dirty (and by no means exhaustive!) list of ways partners in successful relationships act.

In a good relationship, partners:

– Do everything in the spirit of loving respect
– Strive for accommodation, not submission
– Are generous of spirit, believing that they should try to work for the other’s happiness
– Are not spiteful and do not act in opposition to one another just to win, to “be right”, or to make sure the other loses
– Are flexible and open
– Are trusting and trustworthy
– See more or less eye to eye on important issues, instinctively or through deliberate effort
or
– Recognize that they have crucial differences but make room for the position of the other to exist; acknowledge the differences but do not assign value judgments to them and work as much as possible to go on productively even with the differences
and
– If they’re fortunate and strong, use their differences, as they become apparent in daily interactions, to facilitate their own and each other’s development
– Are able and willing to express themselves to one another
– Are never harsh or critical of the open expression by the other
– Take responsibility for hurting one another
– Are able to apologize and accept apologies
– Never resort to violence, humiliation, name calling, and other below-the-belt tactics
– Pull their weight more or less equally in a relationship, recognizing it as a partnership
– Do not resort to martyrdom or righteous indignation, emphasizing one’s own contribution over that of the partner
– Keep their remarks about one another to the present situation as opposed to holding onto and dredging up old issues
– Have achieved some kind of sexual harmony, as far as the quality and quantity of sexual activity
– Never use sex as a power lever or a bargaining chip
– Have achieved an understanding of how to handle financial matters that works for both
– Never use money as a power lever or a bargaining chip
– Recognize the values the other has and try to accommodate those values, even if they themselves do not consider them important (e.g., if a wife asks that coats be hung on hooks immediately, the husband will do so, even if believes that hanging the coat “eventually” is fine; wife will make an effort to turn off all the lights even if she doesn’t think it’s as big a deal as her husband does)
– Never insist that the other “just get over himself/herself” (If one asks for family members to clear plates off the table, the other doesn’t roll eyes or say “Come on, what the hell does that matter? You’re too much of a neat freak/control freak,” etc.).

“All the time that I thought I was learning how to live, I was learning how to die” (Leonardo da Vinci)

I’m starting to think that Faust may have got it backwards. Granted, it must have been thrilling to chase youth, within and without, when one’s years were coming to a close. Today, nowhere near the close, I hope, I find myself fascinated by the experience of getting older. I wonder if getting to taste the old age and then return to my own might be an adventure even more powerful than Faust’s. It’s a curious notion to contemplate, and, perhaps thankfully, a futile one; but in the absence of means to put it into practice, I find myself wanting to separate ageing into the particles that make it up.
It is strange to find yourself no longer young. Well, I’ll qualify that – no longer really young. Out there in the ether 38 would be considered the new 28, but it’s still impossible not to notice the creeping signs of growing up and growing older. I don’t mean the usual, obvious ones – those I’ll lament in private. I’m talking rather about the tiny elements of inner experience that over the years are becoming real to me, practical and lived in, rather than theoretical.
I am aware of the coquetry for a still thirty-something to comment on getting older: I probably haven’t seen the half of it yet. And still, the particle physics of ageing is slowly revealing to me its mysteries. So here is a particle: what if the conservatism we associate with getting older is a reaction to encountering the world one too many times? After seeing and experiencing the pain life can deal us, we may well reach for the comfort of our habits as the only thing we can count on. Even those whose lives have been gentle and horror-free, suffered pain and losses, minor and major.
How can you resist, having been through loss after loss, the urge to hold on to what you had before, to prevent its being snatched out of your hand? The sad part is, the losses don’t even have to be tragic. The loss of Borders felt real and pronounced, and the void it left is still there. A friend told me recently: walking by her favorite bakery, she saw that her favorite cream puffs were gone, and for good. She felt a pang, berated herself immediately for mourning a pastry when the world is filled with real tragedies, and felt the pang again. There’ll be new pastries, of course, but they will not be the same; and not just the taste of them, but the lore she and all of us have created around these particular cream puffs will be gone too. Or, if not entirely gone, it will take on a patina of that nostalgia that seems not quite real to young people. Sure, they think, you say that was great, but was it really? Did it even exist? Do you even know “great’?..
When I was younger, I never thought, banal though this thought is, that the story of getting older would be to such an extent the story of loss. Slowly or suddenly, the world you knew is transformed beyond recognition, and you stay behind, a relic of bygone decades, lamenting coffee, or music, or movies, or traditions of yore in your head, or among your friends. This of course is the experience of the lucky ones, most of whose losses are not losses of people, or home towns, identities, meaning, art, or faith.
It occurs to me that the young fight to change the world because they need to make it their own. Out with the old and decrepit, let us break the old edifice and erect our own in its stead! – while the older generations, having fought and destroyed, built and nurtured their world, want only one thing: to hold onto it, to protect it, to preserve it… They say it’s for those who come later but I wonder sometimes whether it’s actually from those who follow that they want to protect it.
And then, there is likely the biggest loss of all – the loss of hope. It fades, no doubt: that shiny sixth sense that somewhere out there is a bright new horizon ready to welcome us, any minute now, just after this tiny last hurdle. It fades as one realizes that as the remaining days are easily counted, it becomes impossible to believe that life is a climb toward a pinnacle, some summit where “everything is all right in the end.” An old myth tells us that hope is the worst of all evils – so horrible, in fact, that it remained in the box whose lid Pandora threw open. That old deceiver, hope whispers in our willing ears that things will get better if we just wait, keep doing what we’re doing and look to the rainbows. A wise friend of mine proposes faith in place of hope, and suggests that we should cast the culprit off before old age does it for us – give up the useless pursuit of happiness fueled by hope, and stare despair square in the face. I’m starting to realize she is right, and it’s good to get there before forty.

***
The fortunate ones greet the end with wakefulness and satisfaction, secure in knowing that they’ve lived well and seen into truths. The less fortunate plug away in distraction and minutia, or move to the subtropics, where amidst the evergreens they nurture a fantasy that in the absence of winter, there is an absence of death, and in the perennial sun, eternal life. Aye, there’s the rub then – figuring out how to live, grow up and grow old, awake and open, alive to the losses and present to gains. Hooray, Leonardo or Socrates, and let us all hope that we do half as well.

Years ago, I treated a boy whose parents had divorced some years prior. His father, who left the boy’s mother (his second wife) to start yet another family, was quite unwilling to come in and meet with me, even for the mere sake of getting acquainted. Then, after a year or so of trying, I got lucky and the dad came in. Stylishly dressed and well groomed, he had a look of someone quite in love with himself. He was bright and articulate, and worked as a mid-level bureaucrat for one of the city agencies. From the moment he sat down, he held the floor and spoke, with much panache, about his life. I knew a little about him, but not the fact that he had 8 children with 3 different women. When he was young, the man had some artistic aspirations. When telling me this, he paused, suddenly looking surprised, and said: “All I ever wanted in life was to be an artist. Somehow it didn’t work out. How did I end up with eight kids?!” At that moment, my perfectly therapeutic and non-judgmental stance was rattled by a sudden thought, and I almost yelled out: “What? All you ever wanted to do was spread your seed as widely as possible, and that’s exactly what you did!” I didn’t say it, of course, and his monologue went on. And on…

I share this story because it provides an excellent illustration of a curious phenomenon wherein our lives actually come to embody our true desires, not the professed ones. Sure, we may be completely convinced that all we want is devote ourselves to art, but how could we explain the fact that our so deeply cherished desire gets derailed by our having… eight children! Granted, one or two could be accidents; I could even extend that to three, but eight, on the other hand, suggests something else entirely. My patient’s father certainly did have a superficial interest in wanting to be an artist, but it’s clear, from the course his life took, from the choices he made, that his truer interest was populating the world with as many versions of himself as possible. This may sound cruel, but, given the fact that he was not terribly active in his children’s lives, it’s safer to assume that he was more interested in reproducing then in actually caring for his kids.

How often do we think we know our true desires? A woman who says she wants a child more than anything in the world somehow gets distracted by relationships with men who are very clearly not father material (and often tell her as much). She comes in and says, sometimes even with despair, “How does this happen to me? Will I ever have kids?”, and I wonder if that’s what she — the essence of her, her true “self” — truly wants. Some people are open to contemplating the possibility of a deeper-seeded desire, and expression of their true nature; others resist — “What do you mean, do I really want to succeed?! Of course I do! I just seem to be unable to… for now…” Yet how necessary is it really to work at finding out what it is we’re really pursuing! What is Woman A’s true interest in life that she gets involved with men who are somehow handicapped– physically, financially, or emotionally? What is Man B looking for, if he says he longs for a meaningful deeper pursuit, but stays at Meryl Lynch year after year, “just until I get my bonus and go”?

It is difficult, I admit, to look at our current lives not as dress rehearsals but as expressions of our essence, but it is very important (and so helpful!). It can help introduce us to our innermost selves (admittedly a worthwhile acquaintance) and point out our ambivalence, our conflicts, and our stumbling blocks. Someone told me, years ago, “if you want to understand what kind of life a person wants, take a look at the life he has.” That’s well put, isn’t it? This statement upsets many (since it’s easier to believe that circumstances seemingly beyond our control derails us, and not we ourselves), yet the “genius” or the “daemon” within us is powerful enough, somehow, to weave the fabric of our lives in accordance with his pattern. This may sound borderline mystical, but it doesn’t have to be. The tiniest of decisions, lingering over some situations yet somehow easily dismissing or overcoming others, picking certain people but not others — all not quite consciously — get us through the years to the place we are today. To know this may help us gain awareness, and prevent us from walking blindly through life, so that tomorrow we can say that we are exactly where we wanted, and needed, to be.

Humor me on this one. This is a moment for making grand pronouncements from a soap box, so here it is: every once in a while, I feel the need to speak up in defense of one of my favorite literary characters, Sherlock Holmes.

How silly is that, really, if you think about it? And yet, I feel it’s not. Since to defend him is to defend, as lofty as that sounds, an idea that one can live a life of principle. These modern times encourage us to use the findings of our psychological science to “understand” people, but that just leads to our vision of others being distorted by the clouded lens of modern diagnosis. Like someone out of Andersen’s “Snow Queen” with a shard of the devil’s mirror stuck in our eyes, we proceed to view nothing but pathology in our fellow men. “Daddy issues,” “mommy issues,” “trust issues,” “intimacy issues,” “abandonment issues” — why, there is no shortage of categories where it could all go wrong for a person, so it’s a wonder anyone functions at all! It follows then, for a contemporary pseudo-sophisticated student of human nature, that “functioning” is a compensatory façade. So the student proceeds to peer beyond the façade to search for traces of what makes one “human”. In reality, however, the search is for the animal — it is more comforting for such a student to disrobe a hero and pull him down into the mud, where the rest of us humans live. So it comes to be that principles go grossly out of fashion because they are seen as nothing more than sublimation of issues. And so poor Holmes, a confirmed bachelor who prefers the company of his pipe, his violin, and one trusted (male!) companion becomes a victim of modern-day (psycho) analysis.

He is gay, we’re told. Has to be, or else why would he live with Watson eschewing the company of women?

Autistic, perhaps, since he despises emotions and social longings, or (the latest in the pop-analysis) a sociopath and a psychopath?

The assumption is, then, that health, as is narrowly defined by our “sophisticated” times, is such: emote all over the place (self-possession is just one slippery slope roll away from developing a stiff upper lip and repression!); or want to be others most of the time, and, first and foremost, make sex your absolute priority, acknowledging your basic jungle nature. Poor Holmes! Alas, he fails the test of health miserably since he is skeptical of people at large, and of women in particular, and lives for nothing but short bursts of activity when he is working and quiet contemplation when he is not. Granted, occasional heroin injections don’t help.

How refreshing then it was to see that there are still those who understand him! At least Steven Moffat, whose brilliant new British series “Sherlock” does, and voices his understanding beautifully (no doubt it’s this understanding that accounts for such success with the new series): “He’s not a psychopath, he’s not a sociopath … he’s a man who chooses to be the way he is because he thinks it makes him better. It’s a monastic decision. He takes himself out of touch with his sexuality, out of touch with his emotions in order to make himself better.” It’s hard to convey my delight at hearing him speak thus in an interview on NPR with Kurt Andersen, who uttered the “psycho-sociopath” diagnosis once again, prompting Moffat’s response which captures Holmes nature perfectly: it is precisely in the service of his ideals that Holmes develops only certain sides of his psyche. However, it is also these ideals that our times –which so readily forgive all sorts of sins — cannot forgive. Holmes doesn’t need to take a vow to make monastic decision because for someone like him there could never be temptation; he is much too true to his principles to be tempted, yet it is the adherence to principles that our psychobabble brainwashed public finds so suspect. What is it that he represses, after all? Some major (early!) disruption must have taken place in order for him to cut himself from all that is “human.” By human, once again, they seem to mean animal. But what it is more human than principle, the idea of ethics, of living out your beliefs no matter what winds blow? To some, Holmes is “out of touch with his feelings;” to others, he transcended the bind of feelings.

Yet, the zeitgeist dictates, principles are boring. If Hilary Mantel (an author of recent historical novels set in the court of Henry VIII) as reviewed by The New Yorker is to be believed, we would consider the shrewd monster Thomas Cromwell or Henry himself more human than Thomas More, who, being “a saintly monster”, would just “drown [us] in scripture.” Interesting world it is indeed, in which More, a man who lived out his principles knowing full well that he’d be beheaded for them, is seen as less appealing than Cromwell, who sends him to his death. No doubt More would be viewed as having “issues” too, and thus is understood and hence easily discarded. No doubt too that, not saintly in the least, Holmes is written off as a walking pathology simply for the psychological crime of being true to his nature and his beliefs (perceived by us as “rigidity”). Be he an ebullient, tipsy skirt-chaser, he’d be a picture of mental health. Being who he is, he tempts a lay diagnostician with no shortage of tools at his disposal. Any yet, how many literary figures can claim a hold on the imagination so firm as Holmes does?

Surely, there must be a reason that a man of ostensibly little visible emotion has inspired such love through the decades. We — those of us who love him — return to him not to pathologize him and feel healthier by comparison but to bask in all of his humanity, complex and real, made up of the coldness of his logic and the tenderness of his devotion, the precision of his thought and the purity of his spirit. Time and again, Conan Doyle’s genius creation defies the attempts of those who accuse him of illness for his refusal to fit into their mold of health. It is his character, integrity, and principle that set him apart. His innocence is not in his supposed virginity, but in his absolute refusal to live outside of truth as he sees it.

I love Sherlock Holmes, but ultimately this piece is not about him. I do wish that living people too could be spared the false explanations of their nature. Perhaps they might be better able to live in peace with themselves, if they could accept that the motives behind their “issues” are not necessarily sinister or pathological. Holmes’ version of truth in reality might have lay in bringing hidden things to light. Similarly, for a person with “intimacy” issues, could the motive be not in a wish to withhold or an inability to connect, but in fearing that a connection too is finite and will hence bind him, making him finite as well?… Whatever it is that makes us tick, wouldn’t it be wonderful to see it not through the distorting shards of the broken mirror, but through the lens of a spyglass Man has always wanted to peer through and perhaps catch a glimpse of Being.