The Forging and the Death of a Reflection

By Dr. Peter J. Swartz

This work is a memoir. As a child and a young man, I rarely felt entitled to breath air. Emotionally neglected by my father, as a teen, I left home for a prep school at which I would spend the worst three years of my life. Trouble followed two failed attempts at undergraduate college, until I found my way to a horseshoeing school out west. I was able to work as a professional farrier for several years until a ruptured disc in my back forced a career change. I chose psychology as somewhere in the back of my mind the depression I endured as a child motivated me back to school to try to help others, eventually becoming a licensed psychologist. It was a good fit and I have been practicing for the past twenty-five years, including many years as an instructor in psychology for Harvard Medical School. About seven years ago, I acquired tinnitus (along with 50 to 60 million other Americans) and using my personal practice of meditation, developed a program to help myself and my patients manage this chronic illness. In short, this work traces the 'forging' of a debilitating sense of self and outlines the potential for it's 'death' resulting in a selflessness that connects to the boundless goodness of the universe. Lastly, I have been helped in no small way throughout, by the profound empathy I have shared with many magnificent beasts of the canine variety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456627171

Book preview

life.

An Accumulation of Empty

Somewhere between awkward poetry and fractured prose,

between lost and valued,

lines want to form so to be cast about.

They need to be known.

Someone’s arms need to make that cast,

so that the end of the Line comes to rest on a still enough pool.

The cast Line needs to be visible.

It needs to create a ripple moving outwards on the water.

It seems a very long time since any real try at that for me.

Maybe never, actually.

But the cast needs to happen soon.

The Lines can’t stay all tangled up in here for a lifetime.

It’s not sustainable.

And it’s painful.

As I age, I need to find my own arms to make that cast.

And perhaps there is a unique place from where to cast.

Yes, it’s this present moment—a refuge of sorts.

Caught between the silly importance of the self,

and the gaping emptiness of fear,

it is all at once both sacred and mundane.

And it may be all that I have to stir action,

or spawn compassion, or find myself,

or better,

to even lose myself—lose my own reflection.

This present moment allows me the freedom to untangle and toss a Line.

It reassures like large arms around small shoulders.

Early Years with My Father

My father seemed to have never found his own arms.

He seemed to be looking for them quite a bit though, usually in a tense or angry kind of way.

He certainly never found a way to get them around my small shoulders.

Tortured without the facility or the practice in using his arms, my father was exquisitely able to keep his own ducks in a row.

And he never mixed his peas and carrots, his two all-time favorite things to say and to do.

Reenacting those two beliefs, his ultimate arenas of expertise, were essentially and sadly for me, his only arenas.

Fishing with Father

"Grab hold of it!

Both hands!

Tighter!"

I was about ten and out with my father on a deep-sea fishing boat.

I had apparently hooked a large cod and was pulling it up with a hand line.

The activity had captured my father’s attention and he was exhorting me.

The pressure in his voice was even more elevated than the customary, tense level.

Tighter!

Use both hands!

My father was making his points.

My excitement quickly vanished, extinguished by the sense that whatever I was doing, it was not turning out well.

It was a familiar little death.

Though I had no understanding of what was happening in that moment.

And then a split-second later, I hear another voice,

"No, he’s all right.

He’s doing fine.

Yep, just like that with the tips of his fingers.

Nice and easy.

That’s it."

The boat’s captain had moved over to offer his point of view.

I felt complete surprise hearing my father’s voice orders countermanded.

It was a first; and it was a revelation.

What? What I was doing was just fine?

I am shocked.

And simply hearing an accurate reflection of what I was doing—just holding the line lightly with my fingertips in this case—was a recognition that hit me like a tremor. It was a foreign experience, but oddly comforting.

My world expanded in that one moment, for a brief moment.

"It was possible to be noticed, to be seen?

It was possible to be doing something right?"

Revelations can happen in a moment, but absorbing them can take a lifetime.

The void created by the absence of recognition leads to self-blame.

Regrettably, that is the only explanation available to the ten-year-old me.

I can’t see much beyond my own experience.

I can only know the present and surmise that I am at its center.

I do see my own reflection, watching it as it takes shape.

Knots can happen, especially when trying to catch something.

I know that my father will take over and take care of the new knot in the fishing line.

Give that to me.

The hand-over happens.

The untangling happens silently in my father’s large hands.

And the hand-back happens also in silence—time after time, scene after scene.

How is it that I’m not a part of this?

I wonder silently.

It’s my line.

It’s not even that big of a tangle.

"I’m happy in a way that the line is freed up, but…

I’ve learned that thing again.

I can’t do it for myself.

More than that—

I know I can’t do it for myself now with this knot, and likely not later with any subsequent knots that surely will arise.

A Day at the Beach

It was the beach and it was summer and I was six years old.

A regular venue for my father’s vacation from his job at the Navy Yard was the beach.

Sometimes it included a rental cottage for a whole week.

Other times there were day trips when the highlight of the drive to the beach became a sort of competition between me and a friend along for the day.

Who could spot the approaching, looming roller coaster first?

A contest determined by true child-honor and naïve child-honesty.

A competition for which the outcome was not important.

A contest decision that was never even questioned.

It was not worth it.

An acute awareness of our mutual refuge was, however, very important.

It was strongly felt by each of us.

We had frequently experienced the value of that refuge.

We respected and allied with each other when it seemed others did not.

We get past the roller coaster.

We anticipate the day.

All soon move to the shore.

Hey Dad, do you want me to fill the bucket with sand?

No. I’ll take care of it.

Parking the blanket a good distance back from the water’s edge, my father had begun his predictable summer-construction-event-in-the-sand.

He seemed to begin with a mental blueprint of sorts, like sizing up a golf shot.

The siting was secure.

No errant waves would have a chance of touching his work.

My father was actually quite talented.

An engineer, by trade.

He designed electrical systems for submarines.

After 30 plus years he had risen to a supervisory level, though he never did seem proud or comfortable with himself.

Today he was sculpting a life-size elephant in the sand, and it was an all-afternoon event for all to behold.

He went at it with steady purpose.

Not much of anything else seemed to matter.

Peanut butter sandwiches on soft white bread were available in the picnic basket.

My friend and I both felt adrift as my father circled the sculpture, but we watched, and we were duly impressed.

An occasional walker-by circumvented the scene and offered,

Nice elephant.

My father would pay no attention to that, for sure.

The likeness steadily emerged:

First the trunk, now the tusks curving skyward, now the sturdy legs.

A black stone became an eye peering seriously outward, and a large flap of an ear covered half the head.

My father worked carefully, so as to have all his elephant parts neatly in a row.

I moved away, closer to the water’s edge.

I was soon joined there by my friend.

We would try our own sand project—a castle in the sand with wet-dribbled towers on its hopefully thick-enough walls.

We would try dribbling mixes of sand and water over the castle.

Inevitably a wave arrives and our play is compromised.

At times we try again with a protective moat in the sand, but instinctively I knew we had both been losing interest in our own play even before the wave came.

I checked back in with the elephant.

Do you need some shells for the toes? I offered and hoped.

My father did not look up.

"Not ready for that yet.

Well, I guess it’s about done.

It’s bigger than the one I made last summer isn’t it."

My father mused to himself out loud.

It’s nice, Dad, I commented quietly.

What? he said, looking away.

And with that, not waiting to hear a repeat of the comment, my father quickly returned to his beach blanket to take the last of the afternoon sun.

Alone, I circled the formidable sand-beast, somehow still admiring the quality of the production.

It was clear and impressive that my father was a talented and successful elephant-maker-in-the-sand.

When I was fairly certain that my father was through paying