So it is Sunday, the Leafs have already charted their course to ignominy, and the Jays game isn’t on for another few hours. It is Sunday, and in another headspace, I might be sitting and ‘listening’ to pronouncements from a pulpit. It is Sunday, and in yet another life, I might be suiting up for the long cycle or run of the week. It is Sunday and in the current iteration, a time for reflection. . . and trying to make sense of the world. 

They’re rioting in Africa,

There’s strife in Iran,

What nature doesn’t do to us

Will be done by our fellow man!

The ‘Merry Minuet’, penned now some 75 years ago and popularized in song by the Kinston Trio 25 years later (the Kingston who??), the tune may, just may continue to resonate. No need to even search and replace — pretty much a constant state. Civil War has just hit the big screen (as they used to be called) ‘documenting’ the warring of rival factions in a ‘near-future’ US, following secession of various states. This time with no ‘altruistic’ justification — just another p______ contest, vying for power and control. Just another polarized lose-lose. Well those are all very jolly thoughts!

It is Sunday and, by some prescriptive observances, a time to suss out the roots of all (this) evil (at least until the game comes on). Depending on how far down this particular rabbit hole one wishes to dig, a dozen or so centuries should do it. So the Seven Deadlies, it turns out are not the brain children of Thomas Aquinas — but he did do a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to explicating (psychobabble for mansplaining) the dynamics of same. 

Seems evil is, well, a non-thing. Lest Brother Tom be dismissed with a wry ‘oh really!’, his point is, in 13th century monk-speak, evil is ‘the privation of good’. Good (again, recalling what day it is, God with a spare ‘o’) is the thing; and it follows that doing bad s____ is the failure to do good stuff. There, that’s all cleared up!

Climbing out of the rabbit warren (or maybe just doing a little sideways burrowing), I thought I’d have a look at the evil rankings — less of a mouthful than ‘non-good rankings’. A bit like picking a political pole to see who tops the list. Seems my fave, is generally pretty far down in the stats — like batting in the low ‘200’s’. . . on the team, but not a heavy hitter. Wrath (as Tom would put it) bats 6th, ahead of only Sloth — but who could expect much more from a sin that looks like it spends its day sleeping. 

At the risk of dissing the front end of the batting order, I’ve come to see Wrath as a pretty main actor — you can field a team with no right fielder — but sooner or later some left handed, pull hitter will drop a fly ball out there. And then where would you be?

So with apologies to Greed, Lust, Gluttony and the rest of the big boys, I’ve promoted Wrath — or what I’ve come to deem Reactivity to hit cleanup (I’ll let the baseball metaphor go soon, I promise). Like anger (aka, wrath) this is a ‘secondary emotion’, one that rides piggy back on other ‘primary’ ones. Our cleanup emotion’s job (now 4th in the lineup!) is to take advantage of the table that’s been set; to ‘single in’ the potential runs on the bases, to consolidate — to justify its existence. Can’t you just read all that grand rhetoric between the autocratic lines?

So, if we buy into the pontifications (how many metaphoric tunnels is too many?), and consider the rest of Old Tom’s ruminations, there are some situations where Wrath / Reactivity is justified. In Sunday-speak, it might be deemed ‘righteous anger’. The trick, of course, is being clear about the bright line that divides this OK losing of one’s s____ from its much more ubiquitous buddy, common garden vengeance. And perhaps sparing a thought for OT’s flip side of the 7 Deadly coin — the other list (much less titillating, and popular), the seven Heavenly Virtues (it is Sunday): the non-things of Wrath/anger/reactivity counterbalanced by the things, Patience/compassion/forgiveness. (Hmm, where is this all going?)

A significant part of my week is spent exploring the roots of and implications for reactive responding. In common parlance, forgetting to engage brain before opening mouth. Or worse, not even being aware that mouth may need a bit of a governor. As a balm for all this ensuing noise and friction, I’ll spend even more of my week banging on about pause buttons and (wait for it) interoception — pulling back all that invigorating and ‘righteous’ bile and focusing on one’s own physical state. To take a page from Tom’s vellum, and much (much) older wisdom, flipping Wrath on its head and inserting a few seconds of, well, nothing (‘equanimity’ if we really need to put a word to it). Then making an informed, intentional call. One last allusion: checking one’s swing, laying off the pitch out of the strike zone, taking the ‘walk’ — literally. 

But what’s that sound — ah, yes that distinctive lyric: Take me out to the ball game. . . So here endeth the homily.

It’s always been important to be clear-eyed and thoughtful. . . in just about any forum. Take work and play for example. I have been a good runner and cyclist, I like to take pictures. I process a lot my thoughts in written form. And, academically, historically, passions ran to English, journalism, and social psychology. On those long, overnight drives to Florida at (what used to be called) Easter vacation, I would do mental math calculations, averaging rates of speed (odometers are never quite accurate!), mileage (converting, again at the time, US MPG to Canadian gallons and dollars), and ETA’s (usually courtesy of our trusty CAA TripTik). So I guess we’d have to throw ‘stats’ into that mix as well.

The catch of course is that I was never going to be a pro photographer, successful author, humanities prof, or win the Tour d’anything. Becoming the next Edwin Zimbardo was not in the cards. (Bit esoteric, but next to the great and now infamous Milgram ‘shock study’, a masterful designer of social psych ‘experiments’.) In short, I was never going to keep pasta on the table doing any of the above. These were, at most, long-cultivated hobbies. Essentially, play.

Leisure time or otherwise, my interest in human behaviour has remained a constant. While clinical psychology has (happily) continued to be the ‘bread and butter’ — if we’re allowed gluten-filled, high fat metaphors anymore — it’s been the ‘dividing the world into two camps’ that fascinates. Reductionist, overly simplified to be sure — but captivating nonetheless.

The buzz phrase of late has become ‘evidence-based’. For very good reason, one would like to build one’s practices and beliefs around the science, the data, the verifiable outcome of a particular approach, intervention. Hard to argue with that position. Well evidently not. Which is where the social psychological genie finds its (gender neutral) way out of the bottle. Seems ‘the evidence’ is a very fluid entity — wildly eager to be influenced by all manner of factors that have precious little to do with fact. What we want (need?) to be true, becomes true — becomes ‘the science’. Anecdote replaces tested evidence. Opinion becomes gospel (in too many cases, literally). Experts abound — and are oh so willing to share the ‘wisdom’.

Following the State of the Union night a month or so back, talking heads (on both sides of the great divide) speculated about the gap between the data (inflation is stable, even decreasing, crime is on the decline, and the sky is blue) and perception (cost of living is killing me — not to mention those nasty, evil-minded migrants, and the last election was a fraud). What’s the deal? Turns out it’s one of those ‘it depends’ things. Depends who you ask. Depends where you live. Depends on which side of the bed you got out of. What it doesn’t depend on is ‘the data’. Those (depending on one’s agenda!) are biased, incomplete, or just . . . wrong (apparently).

And thus to horses. The apple of my wife’s eye is a four year old mare. The relationship began some two years ago, initially as a gateway back into the world as Covid began to ebb and connection at something less than six feet distant was tentatively allowed. Relative newbies to ‘vertical condo living’ when the portal closed with a crash in early 2020, we adjusted badly to ‘containment’ (pandemic- as well as residentially-determined). Despite the idyllic location — spitting distance from Lake Ontario in a welcoming building on the edge of ‘old Oakville’ — my wife’s proclamation came as no surprise, as it mirrored my own sense of entrapment: ‘I just want to go and shovel s____!’ In deep ‘garden withdrawal’, reliant on elevator travel as a prelude to going anywhere (including walking the dog at 2:00 a.m.), bounded by rule arbitrariness on all sides, and (somewhat ironically, given that this was immediately post-pandemic) eager to be quit of people for a bit. . . this made perfect sense. 1200 pounds of Equus caballas was just the ticket — both as a source of said focus for shovelling and insulation from humanity.

And so began the next iteration of band membership. Preceded by church affiliations, choral participation, group travel, exercise packs — all with their established ‘oaths of allegiance’ — the benefits generally far outweighed the admission fee (sort of). And as with any ‘organization’, formed around a common theme / interest, barns of course are no different. They may look like big horse houses. . . but in reality, the ponies are the justification for gathering. As with sociology of any stripe, humanity, and all the variations therein, forms the raison d’être, defines the ‘club rules’, and, of course, scripts the mythologies and lore — you know, those things that displace ‘the data’. 

‘Horse sense’ is something of an oxymoron — at least in the human context. Horses, as it turns out, are pretty sensible. Green garbage bags flapping in the wind, a tractor rumbling down a mow ramp, snorting and lurching, the random crack of a whip — all, to use the common parlance, trigger warnings. To the human, behaviour to be ‘corrected’, suppressed, sadly, even punished. ‘Clear’ indications that said 1200 pound psychopathic beast is headed down the rocky road to chaos and erraticism. Signage above the hay net and water bowl, giving the (human) head’s up that strange and dangerous creatures may be about today and ought not to distress. . . about as useful to this prey animal as the caution on the lecture hall door that upsetting topics will be addressed in today’s class discussing Lady Chatterley’s choices. 

Happily my wife’s predisposition for listening over pronouncing, eschewing the compulsion to engage the anecdotal over the evidence-based, has stood her in good stead — mostly with the horses; who, as it turns out, are ‘speaking’ the only language they have — behaviour. As with all those other ‘speechless’ species, there are no bad horses (well, maybe one or two). There are a lot of folklore-schooled, eager to share humans — whose ‘behaviour’, again as it turns out, is pretty indicative of what colour state they may hail from, which side of the great divide they would land on (if tossed in the air on a windy day — as often happens), which ‘sacred book’ they consulted before pontificating. And so, much s____ has been shovelled . . . and heard. And the relationships thrive.

 What I most appreciate about desk drawers is their essential eclecticism. That would be their absolute devotion to EDI. They don’t discriminate. They offer shelter to anything and everything. Can’t quite recall what I went in search of at the start of this day’s rummage . . . but I did find lots of interesting stuff — including my old Waterman fountain pen. And so down another rabbit hole.

A good friend, sadly now passed, was passionate about more than a few rituals of relationship. Small, but significant practices that defined both her and the connections she honoured throughout her long life. The ‘thank you’ note ranked very highly amongst these traditions. 

After an animated evening of conversation, and likely a few too many Scotches, we’d invariably find an envelope tucked in mail box the morning following — always hand-delivered and handwritten, always in fountain pen. And always penned in a card of some unique provenance, highlighting what she’d most appreciated about our time together on this (or that) particular occasion. These evenings were not infrequent nor particularly noteworthy — but they were special or, more properly made special by this small bit of effort and acknowledgement our friend added to the mix. 

Leafing through the digital pages of this week’s New Yorker, I happened on a piece with the rather chilling header: When AI Can Make a Movie, What Does ‘Video’ Even Mean? A little more surfing and I was at another article with the equally disturbing title: What’s The Point of Reading Writing by Humans?’. These are not stand alone fissures in the foundation of creativity — or even esoteric musings for a phil 101 class. AI ‘product’ has stirred a very large pot of angst on fronts ranging from quicky emails to bogus social media postings, from ‘fake Drake’ to algorithm authored college essays. 

I like to write and I like to take pictures. I have no illusions that I’ll one day write publishable stuff or take widely viewed photographs. What I do know is that both of these endeavours are executed to far superior levels by other humans and, increasingly it seems, by ‘synthetic’ means. In truth, much of the output I write will likely be read by an extraordinarily small audience — often of one, whom I happily live with, and is of late (and under some protest) a Facebook Friend. 

Our long-established practice has been to craft our own reflections on various occasions: birthdays, anniversaries, and all the customary ‘Hallmark dates’ — always eschewing the prefab verse, opting for the ‘blank inside’ card. The ‘value’, while a bit hard to define but as the saying so frequently reminds us, is ‘in the thought’. And by extension, the effort and ‘thought-fulness’ trump the ‘product’. 

As is my wont, haiku is a favourite form and, as such, can be a wee bit inscrutable to the recipient. I have a particular tic when it comes to reconciling the seemingly unreconcilable. Jamming two, diverse ideas together, shrunk to a very few syllables — to see what comes out the other side of the ‘concept accelerator’. 

Valentine’s Day seemed a suitable candidate. Casting around for some strange bedfellows (that seemed inappropriate already!), our newly installed heat pump had just kicked into gear, coincident with me sitting down to ‘think’. (The thump that accompanies both was not lost on me.) And so the project became the creative collision of something akin to ‘The mechanics of relationship’ (??) — hopefully producing something less than an atomic meltdown (in either me or the pump).

The process, start to finish took perhaps an hour or so. But sixty minutes well spent (I hoped) and hatching a reasonably crafted, ‘heart felt’ few lines to commemorate the occasion. Having just previously depressed myself with the New Yorker articles, I thought I’d risk a little conversation with Ms. ChatGPT. Prompting my synthetic muse with ‘Haiku comparing romantic love to the action of a heat pump’. In something less than a second’s time, out pops one of the above — I’ll leave it to the reader (if indeed there is one. . . or two) to decide. 

Which begs the question: if it’s as ‘good’ or better, faster, and ticks all the boxes, why bother? I’ll return to our old friend’s ritual for an answer. We still have many of her cards, stuck in various books as markers, re-read when we want to bring her to mind, treasured these ten years since her death. I’d be hard pressed to find a dashed off text message or recall a ‘thanks for the grub’ voicemail that enjoys anything close to that kind of durability or is more deeply appreciated. Effort and consideration matter. Thus far humans still need to draft the ‘prompts’ in answer to Ms. C’s query of ‘How can I help you today?’