Step one of a million

The nurse midwife had done all the explaining, the checking, the blood pressure taking, the exam, and all that was left was to put a little clear goo on the end of what looked like a fisher-price toy antique-telephone and place it on Cara’s abdomen. It was a little cold in the room so the gel must have been pretty chilly, but my wife didn’t show any signs of discomfort, she just looked excited. Out of the tinny speaker on the pale blue device came a wind rushing, whorling noise like holding a conch shell up to your ear, only this time the ocean we heard was Caras womb. In the distance came the calm “thwump thwump” of her own heart beat from what sounded like miles away, strange echos and tides seemed to surge our of the box. As the midwife moved the wand over Caras tummy there broke the occasional staticky squelch, then more ocean. After only 30 seconds that first thought, (the evil one that our brains seem to keep loaded and ready like a round in the chamber to fire at you) began to creep up, “what if they can’t find it?” The midwife seemed to hear something, she put the box close to her ear, made a small adjustment to the right.

People often describe something as happening “magically”, sometimes its over an event as silly as getting an extra sandwich in their McDonalds bag for free, but sometimes something really does happen as if by magic and is true in every sense of that word. Something unexpected, something that  you never thought would happen to you. Some aspect of reality changes as if an unseen force willed it into being.

In a moment, magically, came the sound of tiny heart beating. Fluttering almost like a moth trying to come in the window towards the light or the way I imagine a sleeping mouse’s’ heart must sound. I heard the sound of my babies heart. Magically.

I had seen two lines on a pee soaked pregnancy test, I was well aware my wife growing nauseous and her sudden desire to go to bed at 8:30. I knew that there was a little person in her body now, but hearing that heartbeat made reality seem suddenly very much more real.We looked at each other and Cara made that crazy smile of hers where every neck muscle pops out, her head squats down between her shoulders and those adorable rabbit teeth poke out over her bottom lip just emits pure joy. There was no more worry, there was just the unexpectedly powerful sounding little engine pumping away somewhere inside that magic body which had created a human. The midwife assured us that the sound was as it should be, strong, regular, and most importantly, there.

We have plans, of course. Everyone in our situation has plans. Names picked, colors debated, the merits of this sort of upbringing or that. Plans make us feel like are somehow in control of the future. Mike Tyson was once asked by a reporter about what he would do about his opponents plans, “everyone has a plan,” he answered, “til they get punched in the mouth.” I don’t know when or how I’m going to get punched in the mouth, but maybe knowing that this little bambino will be the one to suckerpunch me makes it ok. My life has already changed in an amazing way and in 8 months it will change in ways I cannot even fathom. I trust the work I have done to become a good person, a person responsible to myself and the rest of the world will let Cara and I do a good job of loving and raising our baby.

the reality gap

I’ve been reading some interesting things about the brain and how we look at the world lately. one o the more interesting ones ive run across lately describes the way that our ears get information to our brains faster than our eyes can and both of them are faster than touch and smell. Hearing has a more direct (though still not instant) route to the brain while visual info needs to be reoriented the right way up among other modifications to the raw info before our mind “perceives” what we are looking at.  The differences are measured in milliseconds and yet if our minds presented this to us the way it receives the info we would hear words before the persons mouth had formed them, and we would see our hand touching a hot pan before we felt it. In an effort to give us a clearer picture of the world. Like the jarring sense of wrongness when a television shows sound and visuals are out of synch, it would be distracting to us to try to live in a world we observed this way. Our brains take all this info and edit it together so that we can understand it, but this also means that, by necessity, that we are not really living in reality.

By the time we perceive what is occurring it is already in the past,  we have gotten pretty good at working around this fact but as anyone who plays a musical instrument or walks the tightrope can tell you, sometimes the gap is still too much. The gap between perception and reality means that for lots of things we do at a high level of manual dexterity the mind is actually a hindrance instead of a helper. To think about the 300 notes in a metal guitar solo would be impossible and to then consciously force the fingers into the right combination and pressure on the strings is a feat that at the very least would destroy any possibility of sounding effortless and the chance of a smooth improvisation would be nil. The solution is practice. It requires that we train the body, consciously at first, to do what we require without having to “be in the driver’s seat” the whole time, we need to teach the hands and ears to work at the speed of reality without having to send everything through the tollbooth of the brain and then back out to the hands to say “ok now hold down the E string for .25 seconds”. Many baseball players have commented that they don’t really “see” the ball in flight, they simply swing where they “know” its going to be, the more they practice the better their guess is and the more often the ball hits the bat (and if you count foul balls and tips, the ball hits the bat most of the time).

Add to this the idea that our eyes are not perceiving things in one continuous stream, and it gets even more amazing (and unreal). Our eyes take dozens of snapshots per second and our minds fill in the gaps between using the images on either side of the gap. this generally works, but sometimes it doesn’t and we walk into a parking meter or miss a step on stairs and reality comes quickly to us in the form of a bruise. This is why slow motion film is so fascinating, we see a drop of water hit a puddle all the time, but it’s not until its slowed down hundreds of times that we see the tiny explosion, the halo of displaced water, and the bubble of surface tension pushing back upward.

One theory of schizophrenia is that the person suffering from the condition is simply perceiving all this sensory input in the “wrong” order. He or she may see one thing while hearing what occurred seconds or minutes earlier. Imagine how disconcerting it would be to hear the voice of someone who had left the room already or to feel the touch of someone who you have yet to see!

This is one of the things that makes trying to control every little outcome of our lives to futile, not only is randomness and others expectations fighting against us, but so is the fact that we are only ever perceiving a part of the information out there! Maybe one of the things that Zen Buddhism does is to help us live in that instinctual part of the mind that lets us hit baseballs, pull smooth tattoo lines, and play guitar solos. Maybe meditation is practice for living a little closer to reality as its occurring the same way that practicing kung fu is for blocking a punch your brain had not even perceived was on its way yet? It certainly feels that way! I definitely find myself feeling far less “suckerpunched”by life when I meditate regularly, it’s not that I don’t get upset when things go wrong, but that I see them in their proper context  little quicker and small set backs don’t cause outsized emotions and reactions the way they tend to when I’ve been off the cushion for some time.