June 4, 2021
What is a good definition of a friend? I was reading this morning an article about the use of a virtual reality tool to assist people with PTSD and various anxiety disorders enter into a more "real" virtual reality to desensitize and then also uncover repressed memories of traumatic events in their past. I sent this article on to my granddaughter since she has special training and interests in acting. I was reminded of a course I put together with a friend that I met in Jerusalem in 1979 teaching psychiatric residents to use role playing and acting to interact more effectively with some of their patients. My friend a professor of acting at an east coast university and I enjoyed having our class take on the roles of people with fears, anxiety, traumatic and uncomfortable past experiences revisited in their mind and behaviors well past the events. I can not recall my friends name now since we've lost touch over the years. But I now am aware that he was my friend and if I heard from him I'd enjoy renewing our relationship. Nostalgia or somehow related to bonding and enjoyment of a past relationship are characteristic of my research into exploring my mind today. My communication text with this article in the New York Times on virtual reality treatment to my granddaughter was related to her talents and interests since she is currently unemployed in a hard to find a well paying job field and working in a field of counseling using acting skills may be an avenue she could explore if interested. 
The other day I called my friend Jory who is in Honaka'a working occasionally with the upkeep of an nearly empty small hotel he owns with his partner. Lately his cognitive decline has taken a dip so he knows who I am, is able to tell me how he enjoys hearing my voice, and tells me how bored and stuck he feels with his confusions and loneliness! Rebecca and I plan to visit whenever we come to the Big Island. 
Two days ago while hiking up Kuliouou trail we happened onto Tom and Ron eating their lunch. If we hadn't hiked we would not talk ever! Yet these friends are dear to Rebecca and I and we enjoy just the times together on the trail and talking about our lives. We're all octogenarians so sometimes we talk about our family issues, health, concerns, and  other mutual interests. So the context of our relationship in this case hiking determines the contact we have and then ours interactions. 
Maintaining past relationships in which I've not had contact for years give me some feelings of sadness since my present and my past show me there is a loss since my friend in the past is absent not responding to emails, texts, or phone calls. 
Of course, I take responsibility for losing some of these relationships in some instances. One close friends who I've had a long history with (and I've written about previously) has dramatically changed so he's angry, depressed, lonely, full of resentment towards minorities, people of color, and immigrants so he bemoans his plight at times in which I offer suggestions, times, article to read, etc. or he sends me stupid rehashed chain posts he picks up from others full of misinformation and hate. So with these I tell him to stop but he does not so I critique his rehashed posts severely so of course if he accepts these replies he has to feel foolish so in fact I've further alienated him.  
Well, fortunately Rebecca and I are social having many people in our lives so for now these losses and past friendship concerns are part of living. 

I've been exploring some other interests in photography. Currently you can purchase a drone weighing only a few pounds that will fly with the assistance of your iPhone and take photographs. About thirty minutes of flight with a camera that gives some chance of beautiful landscapes and different perspectives. I'll keep exploring since I'm still enjoying walking on trails and taking pictures. 

I was discussing with Rebecca yesterday my conversation over the phone with a relative. How circumstances, temperament, and other factors cause me and others to obsess over our performance and we work ourselves to exhaustion, and with some people (thankfully not for now me or Rebecca) constrict our lives and cut us off from relationships. When I 
was starting medical school, a classmate a year ahead of me who I had gone to college with had to repeat his first year due to failure. This fact caused me to feel very insecure, worries, and motivated to study obsessively with goal of five hours of study after a day of classes seven days a week for this first year. I had no basis to really worry since I aced all my classes but facts did not matter at the time. In work, Rebecca and I know of people so driven by insecurity and wanting to please their bosses and students that they will over prepare, prevent themselves from having a life outside work, and allow others to take advantage of them by piling on more work and not giving just compensation. I could write more as a psychiatrist about the issues and processes that relate to these obsessive behaviors but then that's for another time. 
Our human condition allows us to have close friendships and wholesome life styles filled with interesting things to learn and practice but also we can become isolated, lonely, fearful, angry, anxious and hopeless. Evolution plays a part in this since in the past we had a life "Nasty Brutish, and Short" (Thomas Hobbes 1651) and now can live well into our 80 and 90s with disabilities that in the past was related to our past shortened life. How we live that extended life though is influenced by the group dynamics and societal issues of our times which lately has taken an adversarial turn for the worse. But this is my point of view. To my grandchildren's generation I don't think they are so troubled by this. 
Hobbes on the other hand had a low opinion of our the ordinary citizen and his solution was through a "social contract" have a soveirgn rule autocratically. 
Unfortunately I'm not going to pursue this line of inquiry since I want to see the world with a lens similar to the beauty I see when hiking. 
What is real does deserve some analysis but that may come later.
Leonard

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