” ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time.’

That’s the group we’re aiming at.”

Quote attributed – probably wrongly – to G. W. Bush

I’d like to say that you can tell I’m thinking about something seriously serious when I start telling jokes.  Especially since this is the second in a row.

Unfortunately, my self-delusion doesn’t go quite that far.

I just like laughing.

The story below is copied from the blog of the Lost Bagpiper.

As a bagpiper, I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man who had no family or friends. The funeral was to be held at a cemetery in the remote countryside and this man would be the first to be laid to rest there.

As I was not familiar with the backwoods area, I became lost and being a typical man, did not stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late. As I drove up, I saw the backhoe and the crew who were eating lunch but the hearse was nowhere in sight.

As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I overheard one of the workers saying to another, Sweet Jeezuz, Mary ‘n Joseph, I have never seen nothin’ like that before and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for twenty years…

Usually I manage to write my own posts, but I have been laughing all day since a friend forwarded this to me.   I suspect it’s so funny because it’s somehow the kind of thing I could do.

If I could play the bagpipes, of course.

My stepmother once said to me in that wonderfully wry way of hers:  ”money won’t make you happy;  but it sure helps to solve a lot of problems.”   I wonder.  If money can help solve your problems, can’t it make you happier?

Some time ago, I stumbled on research finding that once people have enough money to pay for the essentials of life – sufficient food, shelter, clothing, appropriate education and entertainment (like television, books, computer access), additional money on top of that can make us happier.

But what surprised me is that, unless there is some unusual medical or other similar need, relatively small amounts of money make us happier, while after that, mega amounts of money may change our lives, but will not necessarily result in greater contentment, fulfillment, or happiness.  The additional amounts of money where it stops increasing reported happiness seem to top out at about $50,000 in today’s money.

I’ve often puzzled about the differences in the amount of money individuals seem to need to feel happy.  Among my friends and acquaintances, and even among my own sibs, there are very substantial differences in the amount of money we seem to need to spend in order to feel happy.

In my experience, children who worried about there being enough money to pay for food and other basic needs worry about money more as adults. But the differences do not seem to boil down to child-hood based anxieties and experiences of poverty, though that often has a role.   Nor do the differences seem to be reflected in the enjoyment involved in spending money when it is available, or in religious beliefs, or in generosity.  Rich and poor seem to have equal distributions of the those who share and those who rarely donate anything to anybody.

Why are some people big spenders?  number 10’s on a scale of 1-10?  why do they find it impossible to go on vacation and return without “things”?  why do they find trips to the shops regular psychological necessities?  why do they find even looking at price tags too limiting?

And what is it about other people who are quite happy with used furniture, clothes from second-hand shops, who do not feel deprived if they can’t afford the newest or best or the most?

I don’t have a theory about this myself.  But I’m awfully glad my husband and I share a similar acquisitive level.  On that scale of 1-10, I think I’m probably about 4.

Maybe I lack courage to be a 10.  Even if I had another couple of zeroes on my monthly income.

At this point, I think I’m unlikely ever to find out.

I have – most uncharacteristically – been watching every episode of the tv series “In Treatment.”  Among other things, the (very good-looking) therapist finds himself in love with one of his patients who reciprocates his feelings, and at the same time, furious beyond words to discover that his wife has just had an affair.  He says he is acquainted with couples who have overcome the difficulty brought about by a partner’s affair, but he himself cannot imagine where the capacity might come from in himself.

I find it an interesting dilemma – although personally academic at this stage in my life.  I was twice madly attracted to someone  else after I was married.  I did not act on it, primarily because I knew it would break my husband’s heart.  But I also reached the conclusion that a monogamous marriage was qualitatively different from one in which there were other sexual partners involved.  And that there was a price to be paid to make a partnership that was mutually fulfilling, and not merely one that met all the paper demands of a marriage that appears to work but doesn’t.

But there were several occasions when I felt I could not be the kind of wife my husband wanted.  And then I would gladly have supported his having an affair with someone who could.  I knew he never would, but I felt it would not have destroyed our relationship.  I’m not so sure now I was right about that, since in the event, it was a possibility that was never tested.

But I am among those who can understand marriages that survive “infidelity.”

I wonder what it is that makes the difference?

We are all worms.  But I do believe I am a glow-worm.

Winston Churchill

It seems that the mythology surrounding Halloween with which I was indoctrinated as a child is historically untrustworthy.  We were not, in fact, joining the souls in purgatory asking for prayers in time to be released into heaven to celebrate All Saints Day on November lst.

The Vatican says Halloween is a pagan festival that is anti-Christian, a celebration of terror and death dancing hand-in-hand with the devil.  Besides that, trick-or-treating is not safe, puts children in danger and frightens the elderly, and should be stopped.

The original offending pagans apparently were the Celts who wore costumes with animal heads to celebrate their new year which fell on November 1st.  Crops and animals were burned as offerings to the gods,  and people  sat around the fire telling fortunes.

The Romans adapted the festival to honour Pomona, the goddess of fruits and trees.  It’s probably where bobbing for apples started.

Today, Americans of almost any religious persuasion and none at all spend almost 7 billion dollars on Halloween each year.

No wonder the bishops think it’s the devil’s work.

In a recent post,  I pointed out that the Dali Lama said when there is a conflict between religious point of view and scientific observation, religion cannot censure scientific observation and we need to change our religious perspective.

I said I agreed.  But I see now that the problem is much broader than religion.  Scientific theories can do the same thing, blinding us to what is obvious.  For years, for example,  psychologists were committed to the view that thought – even human thought – was an epiphenomenon, not real in itself.  Even when human thought was reluctantly let back into the scientific arena, any psychologist claiming that animals actually think was subject to accusations of sentimentality.   The doctrine was that animals worked like machines, not like people.  The fear of being accused of being anthropomorphic still pervades the social sciences.

Now a leading economist has said that the recent economic crisis happened because economic theories blinded economists, politicians and bankers alike to what was actually happening.  They were so sure their theories were right that in the face of the obvious reality, they didn’t see it.

The core of their theories preached first that markets were efficient and rational, and second, that whatever could not be encapsulated within a mathematical equation was, if it actually existed at all, trivial.  Markets, therefore, were efficient and people did not behave irrationally, whatever the uneducated observer might think.  They, after all, were probably not making millions of dollars a year like the those in the heady world of financial services were.

The standard approach of science is supposed to be that theories are tested to see how well they fit reality.  Kaletsky suggests that in this case, and for a period of decades, reality was twisted to fit the theories instead.

I think this is probably an enduring problem of the human condition.  Our theories – religious and secular, formal and informal – are in a constant battle with bits of our experience that just don’t fit.

But as our current crisis illustrates, it often takes a seriously traumatic experience to shake our convictions.  As far as I can see, none of us is immune, and there is no field of thought which is not susceptible.

The two House of Parliament – that is the House of Lords and the House of Members of Parliament (MPs) – have for long years had a choir whose members are drawn from their ranks.

This year they are scheduled to perform “The Messiah” but they feel they must change some of the words.  It is not that they are politically incorrect or may offend someone in the audience.

The problematic phrase is “we are sheep gone astray.”

In the light of the as-yet-unresolved scandal involving sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars fraudulently claimed by individual MPs, choir members are afraid that the audience might stand up and cheer at this admission of guilt.

I’m serious.  I’m not making this up.

Basic equality and principles of democracy ran deep in the family I grew up in.  There were a lot of us and since we varied in age, size, authority, and in the sheer amount of noise we could make, we developed a number of strategies for getting along.

One was the agreement that if we had to share something to be divided equally, the person who did the dividing was the last person to choose which one would be theirs.  If we were dividing a bottle of coke, for instance, the one who poured the coke into glasses got the last glass after everyone had chosen the glass they wanted.

This led to deadly accurate measuring.

I’ve often wondered which one of us thought up this clever rule.  I’m sure it was one of the children, not my parents, but who it was I don’t remember.

I do remember the time when Mary, about age 2,  chose her glass and then watched with horror as her older brother Tom poured his coke into a taller thinner glass.  ”You just gave yourself more!” she shouted in aggrieved outrage.  Tom laughed and said “oh boy, you are going to be easy to fool.”

But Mary learned fast.  I don’t think it was a trick anyone ever pulled on her.

Perhaps it is the particular task of getting old to learn to let go.  We learn to let go of our childhood, our plans for the future,  our careers, our children, perhaps our partners and many friends.

Finally, we learn to let go of ourselves.  To face that eventuality that the individual self that I am will no longer be.

I began to accept this when I realized that I don’t miss any of my former selves – that me that was a baby or a child or a teenager.  Or even the me that existed five years ago.  And so the loss of my current self no longer seems so unbearable.

I do hope that somehow I will become part of the great cosmic mystery we live in.  I certainly hope I don’t find myself in some kind of static, non-changing,  ”perfect” place with nothing to do but sit around.

When my sister was visiting here last month, we were walking in the fields and found a feather.   Her thoughts, too, are about learning to let go.

Way Of The Single Feather

Last night’s mockery of Orwellian shamanism

Still twitched at the corners of my mouth

When I happened upon (never mind that there were several)

Sun stroked remains bearing witness to a pheasant’s sky circles

Brought to a

Dead

Stop.

What meaning might be brought to this synchronous memento of living flight?

There is at first the courage born of facing loss,

and then the dusty futility of objectifying breath

as if, by drying a flower, or mounting the hunted, or refusing to exhale

we might hold sway over the letting go.

Still, a legacy will not be denied this lone feather.

An afterlife, beyond its evolutionary process has begun.

Let it be the pen through which these words flow

An on-going eulogy to a life of sky circles

Marking the pages of my mind’s meanderings.

It will never fly again.  No.

Yet its unconscious beauty allows a sense of awe in my life.

Perhaps I too am a mere part

That the very term realization is a feint.

Is the bird itself a feather?

I will take the way of this single feather as my way for a time.

Perhaps I will learn something.

Perhaps I will remember that I too once flew in great sky circles

And that I can no longer is not my failure

But simply my new normal.

And when the mere shadow of my former self

Loses sight in the darkness of its own passing

I will most certainly contemplate

the way this lone feather came into its incredible shamanic power

and laugh my way to the light again.