Sorry for the delay. I’ve thought about it and wrote something a while ago. But I broke my laptop keyboard (people have told me I type like I’m pounding chicken) and the words I wrote got shipped away. My laptop returned from somewhere under Apple’s care a few weeks later and the words felt stale. I kept thinking about what I wanted to say but thinking is not the same as writing. Today is the day to try a gentler touch!
We ate spaghetti. My grandparents had my cousins and me over for dinner a few days before Christmas. We twisted our forks and worried about Covid and its variants, then Christmas plans (and our variants) until my grandfather brought up the boiling frog experiment. “You know, when the water slowly gets hotter and they boil alive? Because they don’t perceive danger?”
I immediately remembered the frog experiment from when I was dumped in 2018 and immediately felt silly for not forgetting. Once you’ve heard certain expressions or thought experiments, you don’t really forget them. Philosophy is a love language to people like me who struggle to name their emotions without a metaphor, so I understood my then-boyfriend’s way of communicating fear of the future.
We sat across from each other in a red leather booth at a lunch place on campus. I wanted to hold on tight to the present moment while he wanted to jump out of it. There was nothing to say to someone who wanted to preserve something by ending it though. We broke up at a place called The Loop and we closed the loop.
I went to Cape Town a few weeks later to work for the summer. He graduated. Water moved, I moved, into a house of twelve strangers, into sharing a full sized bed with someone I barely knew. I had a stress fracture in my femur so there were no miles through which to ravage myself into numbness. I stayed put feeling and existing with other people. My housemates woke me up early to teach me how to surf, staying with me as waves broke over my body in the ocean. It makes me now think of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese” because the world offered itself to my imagined and real fractures that summer. I had to stay open enough to receive it.
My grandfather realized our minds were wandering. My cousins and I had heard of the boiling frog experiment before. So he pitched another study to us, this time about rats. In 1950, Harvard researchers dropped Norwegian rats into water deep enough that they had to swim, and rats don’t swim very well. After 15 minutes, they began to drown. The researchers plucked them out of the water, washed them off, let them rest, and then dropped them back in the water.
“Guess how long the rats swam for this time?” Papa asked. I guessed an hour. They swam for 60 hours. 60 fucking hours! If rats found that enormous well of hope inside, then humans should be able to harness some hope of what’s to come too. We got it, Papa.
I was actually confused. He asked God to bless our desires at grace. Then he mentioned hope. Which one are we allowed to act on? I learned desire was selfish! My whole family gives up something they want for 40 days every year during Lent. So if you give up what you want, I didn’t understand why Papa would ask the guy up above to bless desires and not hopes.
To be honest, I still don’t know, but I’m coming to a conclusion about my confusion:
I found it fascinating that Papa told the frog story to us like it was a given, that we should resist and jump out, just because the surroundings are changing. What's wrong with adapting to the temperature of the water? I'm going to die anyway. Do I want to die slowly sinking into peace with my surroundings? Or do I want to subscribe to the words of Neil Young (and sadly, Kurt Cobain) and go screaming out of painfully hot water? If I have to resist the water just so I can prolong my imminent death a little longer, that to me seems futile. It seems unnecessarily exhausting to take on the banner of martyrdom as a noble cause no matter what.
I don’t think Papa was asking for a blessing so we can respond to the impulse of desire. He was asking for a blessing to protect us from the pain that a lifetime of desire creates. He gets how wanting something causes unnecessary suffering. The animal studies are cautionary tales to convey the fear he senses, the hope he has for us. He didn’t give us a blessing to go act like them. My grandfather’s love language is metaphorspeak too, I think.
There’s another tale of the boiling frog experiment where researchers entice the frogs to stay in the water despite their pain by placing a fake lily flower in the bucket. The water temperature rises as they wait and dulls their perception of pain. They were busy focusing on what they hoped would happen (a fly possibly landing on the flower) versus what was actually happening (slowly burning alive in dangerously hot water). Some of the frogs still jumped out, but not all. Their instincts got distorted.
When the frog thinks about the pleasure that could potentially come from an anticipated wish on the lily or about dissatisfaction that could come with an unpleasant outcome (not getting the fly), they defy visible impending danger (the boiling water). Hope deluded some frogs to death.
Can you blame them? My iPhone’s home screen is a picture of a guy with his dog and my favorite quote from Humans of New York; “Animals only want to live. It's humans that demand more than they need.” The frogs were just trying to live! Their perception got manipulated in an artificial environment. I wonder how many fake lilies are planted in my life, distorting my own instincts.
I recently reread one of my favorite books, “Buddha’s Brain,” by Rick Hanson. He says desire isn’t bad (looking at you Catholic school), but rather is a tool to guide us toward pleasure and away from discomfort. He draws a connection between the sensation of pain and its corresponding brain activity and says the brain becomes more active with dopamine releasing neurons when we encounter things linked to rewards in the past (i.e: Rats motivation to swim longer upon remembering they were rescued before) and anything that could offer rewards in the future (i.e: Frogs jumping out of hot water onto cooler land).
When desire becomes fulfilled, a part of our brain, the cingulate cortex, tracks whether the rewards we expected actually arrive. If I’m satisfied with something I anticipate, my levels of dopamine stay steady, but if I’m disappointed, the cingulate sends out a signal in my brain and dopamine levels dip. The crash leaves me with an unpleasant feeling of disappointment. Then my brain generates a craving for something else to restore its dopamine levels. And we all know longing for things we want bring pain (like Papa alluded to) and things we gain don’t permanently end desire…
I run a lot of miles and usually write at least three pages a day. My desire to move my legs and bang on the keyboard every day is probably delusional if I did it for something other than the repeated motion itself. It’s desire itself that keeps me dreaming and not planning for the future. It’s intrinsically rewarding to go out and chase something I can’t see immediately in front of me. And inherently unsatisfying. It has no instant gratification but it still feels good for some reason. I can enjoy it while I’m in it but everything evolves and ends, so nothing is completely satisfying. Satisfaction isn’t devoid of desire. It’s not about training to finish a race, or wrapping up interviews to pub a story. It’s relentless. To want more, to be better. But the only thing more painful than having desire is not knowing what I want at all.
One of my role models and favorite runners said on Twitter, “To choose your method of suffering is a privilege.” I didn’t realize how much I love what is difficult until I was talking with a friend a few months ago about the core thing we want. She said Safety. I told her Challenge. The disturbed look on her face disturbed me. I tried to massage my answer quickly, saying to her, “I mean challenge in a ying-yang kinda way.” I am terrified of being content. Obstacles are a way to sensitize and nurture pretty much all aspects of my life: in relationships, in running and in work. I’m drawn to what moves me out of being fixed. It’s the only time it feels like living. I need that feeling of moving water where I can’t quite grasp it but I’m in it and there’s a sense of freedom in movement because it’s very essence is not stale. It’s alive, it feels hard but it feels like love and it feels rewarding.
Is that fucked up?
“Be like water, my friend,” Bruce Lee said. Water just pours into wherever it’s needed at the moment it’s required. I have an cryptic tattoo (often judged as a carrot) to remind me of this: Change and stay the same.
It’s uncomfortable to be dumped into the here and now. I feel the sensation of my keys on the keyboard when I tap softer, type slower. My hands aren't moving like a poultry pounder anymore. Honestly, I’m just typing so slow because I’m distracted on the phone. I’ve been on hold with customer service for 40 minutes. For the past 40 minutes, all I’ve heard are elevator jingles. The new espresso machine I got for Christmas has a leak in the water tank. It’s leaking water all over the kitchen counter and floor. I grab towels to soak up the water and have the urge to hang up. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Eugh!
When I turn toward my circumstances and feelings like water, I’m moving with them, not resisting. When I turn away from my circumstances and feelings, there’s still no getting out of the water (also called drowning). There’s nowhere to go that isn’t water already even if I try, so I might as well deal with my feelings the moment they arise. They’ll become something different soon. I don’t need to act on every impulse, it just gives me awareness of them.
I want to get off hold and make myself a janky cappuccino. I want to let the hot water sputter everywhere and push it into the sink after. I need to stay on the line though. Get my head out of the sink. What I really hope for is a properly functioning espresso machine. I’ll wait. I listen closely to elevator jingles. It’s music and I’ll learn to love it.
What I’ve been consuming lately
Short stories/articles: Ghost Birds, by Nicolas Pizzolatto; My Wine Bills Have Gone Down, by Lucy Feldman; The Insidious Ethic of Conscience, by Joan Didion; Greatest Two Word Sentence, by Molly Fischer; The Sentence is a Lonely Place, by Garielle Lutz; Keanu Reaves Knows the Secrets of the Universe, by Ryan D'Agostino.
Books: Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi; Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, by Raphael Bob-Waksberg; Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer.
Things I’ve wrote lately
Rachel Dincoff: Gotta Get Mad About It, Tracksmith; Profitable Young Runner, New Generation Track & Field print magazine; The Note You Play Afterwards, Tracksmith; This Land is Their Land, Tracksmith.
Thanks for sticking with me. Next month will be focused on media reviews and less about me, promise!