Walking Myself Home

Walking Myself Home

I just read a beautiful story in the Washington Post about a man who spent a year of his life caring for his cancer-ridden wife until the moment of her death. He described it as walking her home. Many people over the years have written about these final moments, and we have seen movies like Terms of Endearment, that capture the wistfulness of someone beloved’s last moment of consciousness. But despite the normality of such stories and such moments since the beginning of time, once in a while, someone captures the sentiment in a new (perhaps just new to me) way that can really move the reader. This story did that to me. I think it’s fair to say that every story and every movie evokes different feelings based on where we are with our state of mind at the moment and when, in our lives, we encounter the story. The story caught me at some inexplicably poignant moment and thus, it moved me.

I probably spend far too much time in contemplation, which is one of the reasons I tend to write. I have said before that I write therefore I am (with apologies to Rene Descartes), which is my way of saying that writing is a fundamental release, a pressure valve, so to speak, of my emotional state. I’m not sure whether other people build up heads of steam in the same way that I do or to the same degree that I do, but I imagine that some must. What that says to me is that since so few people rarely explode or self emulate, they all must have some form of pressure relief like I get from writing. I’ve never been into transcendental meditation, but I’m sure that’s a form of release that works for some people. I’m guessing that chanting is the functional equivalent of the hissing from a pressure valve, releasing its energy in a controlled manner.

I know enough about the physiology of exercise and the existence of things like endorphins, to know that, for some people, exercising allows them to sweat out whatever pressures have built up inside of them. I sometimes wake in the middle of the night with a sweaty head and neck, so as I write this, I wonder whether that is some subconscious way that my body tends to release the pressure that is built up in my brain and that I have yet to release through the written word.

Retirement is not without pressure, but how it is created and dispersed is different. I am finding myself in retirement, with a well-defined set of activities on a day-to-day basis that serve to reduce any pressures I feel. As we know, I spend some of my time doing the work of an expert witness, reading and analyzing materials, and finding ways to express my cumulative wisdom and experience for the cause of someone else’s litigation. I understand that that is sort of a professional activity more than it is a pure search for truth and justice. Every litigant I have encountered in the last five years is out to get something or to prove something. They have their own very specific motives, which may or may not be rooted in what one of us might consider righteousness. I have decided that it is not my place to interpret and be judgmental about their motives, but rather to objectively review the facts as they are presented to me, and then, based on my wisdom and experience, determine whether or not they are justifiable. You notice that I have avoided saying that I am opining on whether those acts are right or wrong, because I know enough about ethics to know that right and wrong depend on the normative perspective of the viewer. My job is to determine and state clearly as possible where the actions stand in terms of industry practice, and thus how they comply with the existing normative standards as I know them. I suspect that the legal system wants me to do exactly that and that they will then be left to judge the validity of my opinions based on a combination of their understanding of normative practice, and their sense of how well my experience represents that practice. That understanding has allowed me to carry forward with the expert witness work, and feel good that it is a decanting of my experience for useful purpose, a pressure release in a valuable form.

The other major activity that I have, as you all know, is gardening. Occasionally a delivery person or passerby will see me groveling in the dirt, and will comment as to why I am doing the work of laborers, implying that the work is not worthy of me. My rejoinder is usually something like that I prefer doing this to going to the gym, or that I enjoy the work, or some such thing. The truth is, I garden because it gives me pleasure. That pleasure sometimes has to do with seeing the beauty I have helped nature sculpt. Sometimes that pleasure comes from the process, and sometimes that pleasure comes from the outcome. I’ve already come to a solid understanding that I am not the creator of the beauty in my garden, but rather simply the shepherd of that beauty that directs it to go here and there and display itself, so that I and those I care about can enjoy it. So, it’s fair to say that, once again, my chosen activity in retirement leads me to do something I feel is worthwhile and then allow others to enjoy it or agree with it or not, as they wish. Thus, when I garden, I am releasing another form of pressure into the world at large. But I also know that there never is an endpoint to the work since nature rolls forward as it will, just like man, in his litigious ways, will keep moving in whatever direction suits him.

I never spent much time formally studying philosophy. I find it funny that as I spend more time pondering the world rather than just reacting to it in the commercial universe, I increasingly bump into the thoughts of the great philosophers. I’m sure that they are rolling over in their graves with every naive realization I come to that someone has thought what I thought was an original thought. The Seventeenth Century French philosopher who went by the nom de plume, Voltaire, once famously observed that “history doesn’t repeat itself…man always does.” If that is so, then I am a regular stutterer and it is less about being forgetful, and more about being too much an optimist. That makes me less to Voltaire’s liking and more like his arch-rival in the philosophical arena, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a leading light in the school of rationalism and idealism. He’s the guy who invented the saying “the best of all possible worlds” and practically invented the modern notions of optimism. His treatise on how God and evil can possibly co-exist is a classic rationalization I have called myself an eternal optimist, so I would seem to be one of Leibniz’s disciples, even though I had heard far less of him than I had of Voltaire or Descartes. I want to think that we can overcome evil in our time or at least in our own lives.

In 1852, Karl Marx, the German philosopher and political theorist, popularly known as the ‘Father of Communism’, famously said that “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.” That is a view of history and the human condition that is anything but optimistic. It suggests that man is ironically incapable of getting out of his own way or to a better place. I denounce that notion and suggest that if we could all take a moment to “walk someone home” in the sense of watching the light of life come to an end, we might be more able to see the beauty of life and the value of optimism. So, here I am, puttering in the garden, puttering with my prose and my expert reports, learning late in life about philosophy and trying as best I know how to get out ahead of things and start the process of walking myself home.