I keep finding reasons to think about our friend Bill (of Dulcinea and Bill). He is gradually becoming one of my heroes and it has nothing to do with the fact that he seems to like reading my blog stories. What has caused me to think and write about him again this morning is the fact that I am taking Kim off for a routine colonoscopy this morning and we have been living with the preparatory stage of that lovely process for the past few days. Why, Bill must be wondering by now, should such an unpleasant process remind me of Bill? The other night when we were having dinner and going to the theater with Dulcinea and Bill, he mentioned something in passing that caught my attention. I don’t remember the exact context, but he was talking about how he has adjusted to his retirement. He has had the typical retirement concern about how to spend his time now that the corporate world is behind him. Bill is a regular guy. He grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York, which makes him somewhere between a rural, suburban and almost urban person by upbringing. In fact, as I think about it, that area of Upstate New York is best characterized as exurban with plenty of influences from all three types of typical American upbringings. He, like many middle to upper middle class people of our age, aspired to college and a professional life, and that’s what he got. Along the way, he adopted all the regular sports like golf and tennis, and aspired to most of the trappings of lifestyle that we all enjoy. But something is different in Bill and that difference came out during that discussion over dinner.
Most professional people who move into retirement spend time worrying about how to stay relevant. They’re used to being a person who gets listened to and followed. Relevance seems to equate to importance to most of us, whether we will admit it or not. But Bill says he doesn’t focus on staying relevant. That notion is familiar to me because I have an ex-partner by the name of Bruce who also grew up, strangely enough, in the Hudson Valley and he goes so far as to say that he wants to become irrelevant (Kim and I have an inside joke about that since she thought I said he wanted to “an elephant”). Bruce, like Bill, is a man of strong character who has a righteousness of purpose on which he acts through his charitable work and good deeds. When Bill said that he did not focus on staying relevant, he went on to say that his quest is for purpose and to be of service. There’s plenty about Bill’s post-retirement dance card that makes that comment much more than a passing noble sentiment.
Bill told us a story about a neighbor of his who at the age of 57 has a fairly advanced case of MS. If this man lives near Bill, he was most likely a man who achieved some degree of financial success in his life. He has the means to have help with his disability, but there are apparently times when he is unattended and in need of help. Recently, he called Bill and apologetically asked if Bill could come over and help him use the bathroom because he was alone in the house and his need had become urgent. Bill went over right away and did what was necessary to help the man, including cleaning up some of the mess created by the urgency. There is nothing in Bill’s appearance that makes him look like a hospital orderly or janitor. The man was apparently mortified that he had had to impose upon Bill in that way, but Bill was very much unfazed and happy to be of service.
As Kim has struggled with the pre-colonoscopy process, especially given her bariatric surgery that makes digestive urgency an all too common state of being, she complained to me that she thought that the process was humiliating. There are many things not to like about the colonoscopy routine, a routine that we must all submit to at some point in life if we want to stay healthy. I can see calling it unpleasant, annoying and perhaps even gross, but it has never occurred to me to think of it as humiliating. It is somehow like being ashamed of one’s nakedness or the imperfections of life. I am listening to David Sadaris’ humorous book called The Land and Its People, in which he tells of taking his partner in for a colonoscopy and being in the room when there was a question about his bowel movements. Sedaris wanted to run out of the room and said openly that he and his partner never speak of the less pristine aspects of bathroom requirements. That strikes me as very…unnecessary. We are all human. As the title of another child’s book declared, We All Poop.
A few intersecting explanations exist for all of this. Of course there is the primordial or evolutionary “disgust theory” that evolved as a disease-avoidance mechanism. Shame extends the avoidance from the substance itself to the act, reinforcing social distance from a contamination risk. But the real reasons seem more psychoanalytic or sociological. It probably starts with toilet training and parental disapproval. Freud built a whole psychosexual stage around it, but even without buying the broader theory, the basic observation holds, early shame conditioning around elimination sticks (so to speak). European manners from the medieval to modern period progressively pushed bodily functions out of public view, with eating, spitting, nose-blowing, defecation all moved from communal/public activities to private ones over centuries, tracking the rise of self-restraint as a marker of social status. Embarrassment became a tool of social differentiation: the “civilized” person doesn’t acknowledge their own animality. Some believe that humans need to deny their physical, mortal, animal nature to manage existential anxiety. Hence the discomfort runs deeper than hygiene. It’s worth noting that this isn’t culturally universal in degree, with wide variation in how much privacy/shame surrounds these acts across societies and eras, which is itself evidence that the disgust component is real but the embarrassment layer is largely learned and historically contingent.
I love Kim. I would do anything for her. We are married to support each other in whatever each of us needs. There is nothing that any civilization layer can do to alter the fact that I have signed on to be of service to her… no matter what. What I am digging about Bill right now is that he has done what we should all do…extend that same thinking beyond our nuclear support group and recognize that it is the human condition to need one another and to help one another. Humans are the only animal to have the cognitive surplus to reflect, plan, and judge ourselves, bolted onto bodies that are still just biological organisms that are hungry, mortal, prone to decay and in need of relief. Existentialists (Sartre, Camus) frame the human condition by saying that we are forced to create meaning rather than discover it. Camus says that the universe is indifferent, we crave meaning anyway, and the resulting friction is the human condition. Buddhism says we all want things to be other than they are, but they’re not. That’s especially so because we are radically dependent on others yet we all stand alone in our consciousness, unknowable from outside. Our hubris, fate, and the limits of human ability to control what we can’t control gives us unnecessary angst. We need to be more like Bill…accept and embrace the human condition. It really is all we have.