Category: Musings & Reflections

Thinking Problems

Paul O., a physician, was the author of Acceptance Was the Answer, a beloved chapter in the Big Book.1 He expanded on his philosophy in a subsequent book.2

At the very outset Paul O. noted:

Alcoholism is both a drinking and thinking problem.3

In Chapter 3 — “Mental Sobriety” — he cleverly tweaked Robert Seliger’s “liquor test”4 by replacing drink(ing) with think(ing):

  1. Do you lose time from work due to your thinking?
  2. Is your thinking making your home life unhappy?
  3. Do you think because you are shy with other people?
  4. Is your thinking affecting your reputation?
  5. Have you ever felt remorse after thinking?
  6. Have you gotten into financial difficulty as a result of thinking?
  7. Do you turn to lower companions or an inferior environment when thinking?
  8. Does your thinking make you careless of your family’s welfare?
  9. Has your ambition decreased since thinking?
  10. Do you crave a think at a definite time daily?
  11. Do you want to think the next morning?
  12. Does thinking cause you to have difficulty in sleeping?
  13. Has your efficiency decreased since thinking?
  14. Is thinking jeopardizing your job or business?
  15. Do you think to escape from worries or trouble?
  16. Do you think alone?
  17. Have you ever had a complete loss of memory as a result of thinking?
  18. Has your physician ever treated you for thinking?
  19. Do you think to build up your self-confidence?
  20. Have you ever been to a hospital or institution on account of your thinking?5

A few pages later Paul O. observed:

All my problems today are thinking problems. I don't even have a problem unless I think I do. If I think I have a problem, I have a problem; if I don't think I have a problem, I don't have a problem. Never have I thought I had a problem and been wrong.

Not only do I alone decide whether or not I have a problem; I alone determine the size of my problems. I don't have many little problems; I don't bother with them. [...] When I do have a little problem, all I have to do to make it a big problem is to think about it.6

Humorous, simple, profound. ✸

  1. Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001, pp. 407–420
  2. There’s More to Quitting Drinking Than Quitting Drinking. Torrence, CA: Capizon Publishing, 1995
  3. There’s More, p. cover
  4. Alcoholics Are Sick People. Baltimore: Alcoholism Publications, 1945, pp. 9–12
  5. There’s More, p. 39
  6. There’s More, p. 54

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Be Here Now

Some lessons take take a long time to learn.

I took Induction to Non-Western Religions during my first semester of college in 1988. Here’s the description from the course catalog:

An introduction to the study of non-Western religious traditions in south and east Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto). Open to everyone but especially appropriate for first and second year students. Fall semester.1

James W. Laine, Ph.D., was our professor.

First edition of “Be Here Now,” the perennial bestseller by Ram Dass. Image: Burnside Rare Books

I have three memories of the course. First, our classroom was in Old Main, a gorgeous stone building dating back to 1889. It looked and felt like college in the movies.

Second, one of my classmates was a Theravada Buddhist monk — shaved head, orange robe, sandals — from Sri Lanka. Dr. Laine would banter with him in another language (Sinhala? Pali?) during class.

The third and most important memory is a lesson that took decades for me to internalize. This is part of an e-mail that I sent to Dr. Laine in June 2020:

I remember bits and pieces [of the course] including a parable that you shared during class. The details are probably distorted by time, but it involved someone escaping a tiger and a cliff. The person, despite great personal peril, was able to pause to enjoy some succulent berries growing on the side of the cliff.

Dr. Laine helpfully replied:

The story you allude to has many versions and interpretations. Tolstoy learned of it from the Tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, a medieval Christian tale whose origins are in fact Buddhist (Josaphat being a garbled version of bodhisattva). Gandhi, I believe, learned the tale from Tolstoy. So a Buddhist tale went west, turned north and came back east.  Who knows, maybe Gandhi passed it on to Martin Luther King or Mandela or Cesar Chavez, all of whom he influenced.

With that lead, I was able to track down this version of the parable:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!2

This parable wound up being the most important thing that I learned in college, although I didn’t know it at the time. It took years of subsequent seeking and suffering for it to become lived experience.

There is just the eternal now. The tigers of the past and future are memories and imagination:

Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now.

Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.

What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace—and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind.3

Be here now. ✸

  1. 1988/90 Catalog. St. Paul, MN: Macalester College, 1988, p. 159
  2. Paul Reps. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1957, pp. 28–29
  3. Eckhart Tolle. The Power of Now. Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 1997, pp. 41–42

Endnote. Be Here Now, which was published in 1971, consolidated these earlier materials into a single volume.

Image: Burnside Rare Books

March Madness

I married a basketball nut. This is her most wonderful time of the year.

I enjoy sports, too, but for deeper and more practical reasons. I’ve long considered football (the American variety) a metaphor for life. For example, Nick Saban’s “process” is one of my key clinical tools:

“Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.”1

The Washington Post recently published a long profile on Kim Mulkey, the women’s basketball coach at LSU. She’s unquestionably great in objective terms—four national championships—however, this paragraph stopped me cold:

“As a head coach, you’re responsible for so many people; you’re taking on a role that leaves a very lasting impression,” a former Baylor player says. “You might be able to win us a championship, but are people going to want to come back and see you?”

That’s the side of coaches (and leaders more generally) that people seldom see. Nobody writes stories about that.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is three_peat.jpeg
Credit: North Park University; Chicago, Ill.

But I’ve seen it. Joan’s a basketball nut because her father, Dan McCarrell, was a college basketball coach. Former players and assistant coaches are always calling “Mac” on the phone to reminisce about past triumphs—but also to thank him for the springboard into later non-athletic successes.

The trophy case and championship rings are nice, but there are bigger prizes. ✸

  1. Ryan Holiday. The Obstacle Is the Way. New York: Portfolio / Penguin, 2014, p. 87