With the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg last week, my wife and I felt a strong need to immerse in ‘something Ruth’ — as I suspect did many of us, impacted as we were by this extraordinary woman’s life and achievements. We settled on a watch of On The Basis Of Sex, a biopic documenting her days as a young lawyer, wife, mother, and passionate advocate and activist.

A scene near the film’s beginning portrays RBG attending one of husband Marty’s second-year Harvard law classes in his stead — as he battled, at the time, a disabling cancer diagnosis. The professor, Paul Freund, begins with his oft quoted assertion about the law:

The Court should never be influenced by the weather of the day but inevitably . . . by the climate of the era.

Contained therein, at once, is the need for consistent, established, grounded parameters and precedents by which individual circumstance is evaluated and ‘judged’; and a readiness and openness to evolve, to reflect not only history, but current, defining standards, understandings, realities. The film dramatizes RBG’s application of this figural principle as she begins a long (long) process of revisiting laws that are, perhaps inadvertently or even with ‘good initial intention’ (‘protecting women!’), in the current ‘climate’, discriminatory and gender biased. An irony explored as well is the opposing strategy of piling up law after law, framed around similar ‘principles’ (gender biases) as an argument for stasis, too burdensome to be considered. RBG takes the pile as a shopping list for change.

What resonated for me, far beyond the content of the film, is a broader conundrum: the demand to reconcile history with current reality; the critical need to learn from what was — but also to ‘extend the law’, to allow context to inform our choices, decisions. For some of us there is an inherent anxiety around change. The unseating of the familiar, the comfortable and well-trod paths is often resisted — raising for us the spectre of uncertainty, the unknown, the chaotic. Equally, for others the prospects of retaining the status quo for the sake of sameness, what’s always been, is abhorrent. What RBG embodied was the blending of these two maxims: a willingness to explore ‘what’s wrong’ with, anachronistic about an existing state; and to provide a pathway forward — viable, contemporary alternatives. The baby is not thrown out with the bathwater — but equally is not compelled to languish in a tepid, tainted pool.

Some years ago, I had the good fortune to hear Marcus Borg, a teacher and theologian, speak about an ‘historical-metaphorical’ reading of the Bible. At the time, I’d spent a good part of the preceding forty years quite happily ‘in the wilderness’ — sufficiently disenchanted with all things ‘churchy’, that, since my early twenties, I had no desire to darken any such doors. I’d also recently returned from a trip to the UK and a (completely unexpected) attraction for traditional sung Evensong services held daily in the cathedral we were visiting — a practice in place for the past 400 or so years — and largely unchanged. Borg provided the crucible wherein these strange and apparently opposing bedfellows could be mixed. I’d struggled with the fundamentalist, literalist interpretation of a liturgy that felt completely out of synch with the 20th (and now 21st) century applications; but still wished to hear the music and appreciate the traditions of an established spiritual tradition. It appeared that I could indeed have my cake and eat it too!

A core dilemma lies not in the ‘rightness’ or ‘timeliness’ of one or the other — the historic or the contemporary. It lies in the setting of these two polarities up against each other as absolutes, the black or white ‘truth’ one or the other of which must be championed — without one informing, improving, tempering the other. And all too often the stage on which this battle appears is the court. Recall the Monkey Trials pitting an evolution-teaching high school instructor, John Scopes, against his home state, a decidedly fundamentalist Tennessee.

Courts, by their very nature are built around an adversarial system, seen, perhaps simplistically, as providing a winner and a loser. RBG has allowed us to focus on the process, wherein each case is seen not as an end in itself — but as another brick in the wall of change. Very occasionally these individuals present, not as flag bearers for one side or the other; but as conciliators, less intent on winning and more on consciousness raising, less targeting the right or wrong and more on improving and contemporizing. And, like RBG, they are in it for the long haul.

As a parting image, consider Alan Watts description of Indra’s Web and the interconnectedness of us all:

Imagine a . . . spider’s web in early morning, covered in dew. Each drop contains the reflection of all other drops.

RBG championed progress, unification, collaboration. We’re all in this together.

In what passed as the dark ages of neuropsychobiology (certainly for me!), aka five decades ago, wannabe clinical psychologists were deemed to be lacking in the ‘hard science’ exposure that defined academic psychology. The discipline was polarized into ‘applied’ (the ‘us’) and ‘research’ (the ‘them’). In efforts to balance this (quite real) disparity, we future clinicians were required to complete a potpourri of four-week ‘samplers’ designed to plug the leaky dike that was applied psychology — I’m sure, every bit as torturous for the faculty drawing the short straw as the student abruptly plucked from his soft, touchy-feely, people-based (ugh!) prospectus and thrust into the rigour and precision of signal detection theory and neuropsychology in general. Who knew, long before the DSM-5 was even a glint in anyone’s eye, that brain science would come to define both sides of ‘the great divide’; and that the bespectacled, aloof, ‘lab guy’ who spent his happiest hours inserting electrodes into the brains of Rhesus monkeys (and his unhappiest attempting to pound a lifetime of research into smug grad students’ brains in one short month!) would be so figural — in his own esoteric way.

A couple of decades after this semester from hell, Quirks and Quarks, a favourite CBC go-to of mine, aired a segment on problem solving. The twist for this research was that ‘real work’ could be done . . . while we’re asleep. In short, instead of just twiddling its Delta wave thumbs, waiting to get back on the waking job and wiling its time away in passively restorative functions, the brain becomes available to a very different kind of work. It becomes a lateral thinking machine! Freed from the constraints and distractions of waking periods, it’s able to roam and speculate in a marvelously free-associative way that opens to possibility, observing out of the corner of its metaphoric eye things, options that would be evaluated and rejected, if noted at all, during waking time. Welcome creativity.

The ‘set up’ for this particular segment was being presented with a riddle with instructions to read it over two or three times immediately before retiring. On waking, one was to note any possible solutions — or more properly ‘indications of solution’ that may have surfaced over night. In this case, we were asked to consider a man, running in one direction, looking up, and seeing a second man, wearing a mask (how particularly poignant during a pandemic!), and then running back in the direction from which he’d come. Two waking images, from my night’s sleep bubbled up (apologies for the double entendre): an old-fashioned drinking fountain with its ongoing jet of water holding a baseball suspended at the jet’s apex; and a fuzzy awareness of Kelly Gruber, the Blue Jays third basemen at the time, standing on first base. The solution, completely out of reach on retiring, clicked: a baserunner, attempting to steal home from third, sees the catcher with ball in hand; and retreats to third base. Hmm. (Now if I’d only put that long, dry, neuropsych. text under my pillow. . .)

Another thirty years forward in the time machine. Nicola ran across a fascinating book recently, Rest. The author, Alex Pang, makes a well-illustrated and compelling, evidence-based argument for purposeful, scheduled periods in our days and weeks for, as his title suggests . . . resting. Far beyond merely fallow time, when we are simply ‘not working’, the case is made for planning these periods and defending their sanctity, as sources of creativity and inspiration. Focussed, intense, concentrated, and effortful work generally is required for, as one early 20th century author puts it, the ‘preparation and incubation of’ ideas, insights — those things we like to call ‘aha moments’. The instant of illumination, however, when the light bulb actually turns on, often occurs in the unfocussed, daydreaming, reflective times when we are engaged in ‘restful activities’ — walking, napping, meditating, . . even sleeping.

Evidently, our brains ‘knew’ this all along — just hadn’t shared the wisdom with us until relatively recently. A diffuse, set of neural connections, initially thought to be irritating, difficult to partial out, ’background static’ (in early fMRI research) turns out to be a gear the brain kicks into when, well, we’re not doing anything! Instead of this activity being a water-treading, idling state, akin to the ‘stealth mode’ that hybrid vehicles slide into when waiting for the next push on the gas pedal, our brain moves over to the Default Mode Network (DMN). Our ‘modern’ preoccupation with measuring the usefulness of states / activities by the time invested in, the (apparent) output generated by, the ‘degree of difficulty’ attached to has marginalized these overtly ‘pointless’ periods as wool gathering at best, wastes of time at worst. Quite lemming-like we become human doings (vs. human beings).

Seems distributing four to five hours of intense focus over our day, interspersed with planned, safeguarded periods of activity normally associated with leisurely, ‘unproductive’ pastimes — even sleep, that most expendable commodity, regularly encroached upon in the name of ‘getting stuff done’. Finding one’s rhythm is an individual experiment. But the math remains the same: some variation on 2 parts sleep, 1 part intense focus, 3 parts . . . rest.

So I’m trying to compose a Mother’s Day poem. The elements are there for my favored form: haiku. Swallows, their preferred food (insects) — nature and metaphysical allusion. But no cigar. A good night’s sleep, a little time spent with the DMN and:

Midges: swarm, shiver,
Swallows: dart, swallow —
Drawn by feast to this false Spring.

Never going to win any prizes for literature — but the connections amongst a snowy Sunday morning in May, a hat-tip to an Aesopian fable, and the immediacy and grace of flocks of birds in their well-choreographed dance.

What’s going on when nothing’s going on — evidently quite a lot!

To glove or not to glove . . . sorry, Hal, but that’s no longer the question! That gauntlet got tossed (down) a long time ago. The quandary now, to continue the Prince’s equivocating ways, is which glove?

The most complicated piece of prep before heading to the grocery store used to be remembering the list. Smart phones kinda obviated that bit. Then came the days of reusable string bags. Aside having to excavate and disentangle from all the other trunk junk, that one got solved too: get a green bin. And now it’s the glove dilemma. So many choices, so many considerations. With the weather finally warming, sliding by with the winter woolies just doesn’t fool anyone anymore. And so a brief primmer on the pro’s and con’s of what’s out there:

The beauty at the left is fast becoming ‘standard issue’. Cheap, disposable, chic (if black is still the new black), and available thru’ my son in law’s generosity. (He keeps a, now dwindling supply for work on the oilier jobs with his 2CV — tantamount to surgical procedures in some instances). I’ve ‘test-driven’ this model. Easy off, full tactile experience (whatever that means), and clearly (as long as Simon’s supply holds out) affordable. The rub, as it were, is ‘easy off’ does not mean ‘easy on’. Anticipating the problem, I spent some considerable time in our parking garage (to avoid embarrassing moments in the store lot) donning these babies. I found ‘pre-stretching’ an essential: standing on the cuff and pulling upwards, gently but firmly, toward the knee. (A measure of economy is lost with several pairs being lost to the process.) Then looping the (now expanded) cuff over the opposing thumb, clenching teeth over same (cuff, not thumb) and pulling for all one’s worth. Makes donning compression socks look like a dream — or just maybe a viable alternative.

The latex-faced, nubby-palmed construction model has much to recommend it. Unlike it’s limp sibling (above), it’s a breeze to put on. No more dropped bottles of cheap red, boasting excellent qualities of adhesion to those slippery surfaces. And no risk of incidental electrocution. Downside: punching the touch screen on your smart phone is a fool’s errand. The ease of on and off is compromised with the need to do just that, several hundred times — as the list fades to black. Expensive, but washable, reusable and not wholly unattractive.

The Jack and Jill is next up. Gender accommodating, for those of us born in the mid-last century. Readily available in most households — although the provenance of used gloves may need to be confirmed if found under the bathroom sink. Covid-19 is one thing; residual . . . well, best left to the imagination. Smart screen responsiveness can be variable.

Sadly, the hockey bag, the cycling shelf, and / or the baseball locker, despite offering up a wealth of choice, have some obvious limitations, generally begging the question.

And so to Prince Hamlet’s parting ambivalence:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of germs
And by opposing end them.

Not an easy call!