Nostalgia

This morning I was listening to a well-known filmmaker talk about how working and making movies has always served as an escape for him, and he hope his movies provide that for others as well. As a psychologist I work to help people reckon with reality. I also realize there is an important place for escape and nostalgic revision in our lives. Why not remember that the chicken dinner in the story of your childhood, the one on some level you know was not good, tasted wonderful? Unless you like the humor of the story of the rubbery chicken dinner and you want to tell it that way. At the same time, I listened to the filmmaker talk and I thought something was missing. Life isn’t a horrible thing to survive through distraction. It’s, to reference a reference Jon Kant-Zinn made in the title of his book, a “Full Catastrophe” to be embraced in each moment for what it is. So it was a pretty good bike ride

The Full Story

Boy did I think about a lot of heavy stuff on my ride this morning! I’ll spare you most of it. But here’s some of it. Humans rule the planet because of our unique ability to cooperate. That statement might feel a little uncomfortable right now. If one were to ask any given American, “say the first word that comes to mind to describe American society right now,” for most people it’s not going to be “cooperative.” And that’s not entirely a bad thing. Cooperative is not the most important thing to be all the time. But we have the ability to get a bunch of minds together and have a collective intelligence. When people see things differently and can communicate effectively about that, meaning they express their perspective and creativity and they truly listen to each other, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s how innovation happens, and it’s how we can learn and grow through conversation and viewpoint diversity. As we all have seen, this process can go horribly wrong in a variety of ways.

We live in constant tension between connecting and diverging. I guess it’s okay not to know the optimal balance, or to accept there isn’t one. In the world of medical research we need a lot of both, connecting and diverging. Sometimes people need to put aside personal ambition to collaborate. Sometimes we need people to say something that sounds crazy to the others, in order to innovate. Sometimes the person in the room the others do not like has a unique piece of truth to share.

Thoughts and Prayers

This is a catch up post, and I feel like it might not be as good as the previous ones because it’s not fresh. It’s been three rides since my last post. Last Sunday my son and I rode together, quietly, and it felt good having that time with him. On Monday I took a long ride, maybe the longest I’ve done, 26 miles in the morning before work. It was the only time I can think of when I was relieved to finish the ride, because my butt hurt. Yesterday morning as I rode I thought about kids battling cancer. I imagined if one of my kids had cancer. I imagined it to the point I wanted to stop thinking about it, and then again came the gratitude. I thought about the value of this sort of exercise. Obviously thoughts and prayers are an insufficient response when one can do more. But I want to face my fears about suffering. I want to grow up more and have real compassion, the kind where I feel for others suffering, I’m willing to feel it, I can hold it, and I can respond with something helpful. So thinking about it does something, and it is a kind of prayer I suppose.

The handkerchief

9/5/25

Today I brought a handkerchief. A simple solution to a simple problem. On my ride I spent some time contemplating what it’s like to have a serious illness. I also considered the dilemma posed by the coincidence of Oktoberfest and sober October, both of which I want to honor, in the same month. I think I’ll find a reasonable compromise. I rode by the very nice looking new clubhouse at the golf course and observed a self driving… well, I don’t know what to call it. On Amazon the old-school version is called a golf push cart. So this thing I saw today looked like that, but no one pushing. It was self-pushing, and it was transporting someone’s clubs. And I wondered, will we soon see such a cart accompanying a robot golfer, and will robot golfers ever miscalculate the wind speed or direction or the slope of the green when they put or which club to use. I think not. I think they’ll be able to shoot a hole-in-one every time. So they won’t do any putting, but they might put sometimes for fun, if they are able to have fun.

My big beautiful bicycling

I think clearly this project of the great cycle challenge needs to be about the cause and the kids who need what the Children’s Cancer Research Fund does for them. And yet I also see this blog as a great opportunity for me to talk about myself! I have felt a little embarrassed sometimes when people praise me for doing the cycling challenge. Because in many ways it is very easy for me. I ride my bike anyway and I like having a good reason to ride some more. Fall is a beautiful time of year in Boise Idaho and it’s wonderful to ride along the river early in the morning. It gets my day off to a great start. So I’ve thought to myself, shouldn’t this challenge actually be a challenge? Well, it actually is a bit of a challenge to ride 300 miles in a month. I do have to go on rides at the expense of other things I do with my time. I do go on rides during the Challenge when I don’t feel like going. And I decided this year while I’m on my rides I will intentionally spend time imagining what it’s like to be a child with cancer, or a parent of a child with cancer. This simple mental task has added a lot of meaning to the rides. Additionally, when my nose was running nonstop this morning and I felt like whining about it, I suddenly thought about what it would be like to live in Gaza right now or to be a family member of a hostage, and then I felt quite happy to be riding my bike along the river with snot dripping out of my nose, knowing before too long I’d be blowing my nose and making coffee in the comfort of my home. So during this month I’m going to read the stories about kids with cancer that I get in emails from the Great Cycle Challenge, and that you can read on their website, and I’m going to think about them and their experiences while I ride, in between enjoying the scenery. I took the photo above on my ride this morning.