Gestalt

Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

Alvin Toffler

Up at 5 a.m. after falling asleep a little after eight last night. My visions of working late and catching up after a frenetic "vacation" foundered yesterday on the hard reality of complete mental and physical exhaustion.

And I feel like hell this morning. Why? Well, I guess part of this muddy headed unpleasantness lies in my diet over the last twenty-four hours. I awoke yesterday morning thinking I'd fix breakfast and go to work. Then a client texted at seven, wanting a "quick call" that lasted through the breakfast hour. I dashed to the office so I'd arrive by 8:30, trying to lead by example although my legal assistant was not there to see it, electing instead to drag in at eleven because of a tummy ache.

Wolfing down a Bevita health cookie along with my third cup of coffee, I opened a Zoom mediation after a couple quick calls. The conference room in the PC office is stocked with junk food, and I partook after a few hours, downing Cheetos, Goldfish crackers, and one of those little Hershey bars while failing to settle a case over the next six hours.

Then at quitting time I raced back to the condo to meet an old friend and catch up over a glass of wine. Well, two actually. He brought nuts and Cheez-It crackers, which turned out to be supper when I drove over to the Yacht Club in search of a salad, only to be reminded it is closed on Mondays. But I knew that already--I'd just forgotten it was Monday. I returned to the condo too demoralized to cook or to work late into the night as I'd planned. Instead I called P for our precious few minutes in the evening catching up, then crawled into bed with a book and fell dead asleep by a quarter after eight. The glamorous life of a trial lawyer.

This blog is part diary, part psychobabble, part reductionist social and political musings. Lately it's been light on the diary part, which seems odd given that so much has happened over the last week. I'll have to unpack it a little at a time, because I find travelogues boring, especially my own.

Roughly two weeks ago I was back in Corning, working remotely and getting ready to drop off the Columbia for its annual then drive to Boston with P to catch a flight to Europe. The trip there addressed two important goals for us. First, we'd spend a day or two in London and fly Jim up from Istanbul to meet Peg and Issac. I was sort of a stress-ball about all that, choking back my hopes for some dreamy blended family scene and telling myself simply having nothing bad happen would suffice. Second, P and I would fly to Portugal for a whirlwind tour in search of a condo or some rustic farmhouse nestled in the spectacular Portuguese countryside.

Why Portugal? If you have to ask, I reckon you eschew the politics page of your favorite newspaper, and you've never heard of the Golden Visa program.

Seems some of our poorer countries with a nice climate developed programs during the Great Recession to encourage foreign investment by offering residential status to foreigners who invested a certain amount of money in their economy. And once you're a "resident", you and your entire family get an EU passport, assuming your destination lies within the European Union, meaning you can hang around in France or Ireland most of the year, touching base back in your host country periodically to re-hack the clock.

Portugal offers one of the cheapest options--a $400,000 condo held for five years is your ticket into the EU, not cheap but manageable. After watching the unraveling of American society over the last few years, and realizing that in-person law practice has become more the exception than the rule, P and I figured we'd cross the pond to check out this island welded to the western edge of the Iberian peninsula, and decide if it would serve as a suitable lifeboat for the Trump Restoration of 2024.

So twelve days ago we left Corning, me in the Columbia bound for Binghamton Airport for its annual inspection, and Peg in the Ridgeline. It was a spectacular morning in the Northern Tier. What one couldn't see in those cobalt blue skies was rather heavy turbulence, especially as I crossed each ridge and found myself bouncing off the ceiling of the plane. I wondered briefly if one of these Columbias had ever broken up in the air, but the thought passed as I greased a landing at BGM and dropped off the plane with Doug Goodrich for a thorough and expensive annual physical.

From there Peg picked me up, still feeling flurpy from her Covid booster the previous day, and I drove us east toward Andover. Trying to raise P's flagging morale as she battled waves of nausea and hot flashes, I began a search for nachos and a glass of wine, which I imagine would be Peg's last meal if she ever finds herself on death row.

Through the miracle of the internet, while hurtling down the interstate somewhere southwest of Albany, I located a restaurant in the picturesque village of Cobbleskill, which prominently featured nachos on the menu.

The Bull's Head Inn was built in 1802, and had fallen into desuetude and disrepair when its current owners bought it in 2013 planning to renovate it in six months and reopen as a restaurant. Instead it took something like three years. I know this because the story is told in framed newspaper front pages on the way to the bathroom.

Mostly Peg marveled at the restored plank hardwood floors, and the very cool old fireplace.

The Bowens can't occupy a space without tinkering with it constantly, and P was alive with questions about how the owners had gone about gutting this place and recapturing its former glory. About that time I recognized a lady descending the stairs and walking to the kitchen as an older version of the owner pictured in those old newspaper clippings. Soon P cornered her as she emerged into the dining room, peppering her with questions about their heating system, flooring, etc. The nice lady demurred on some questions, summoning her husband from upstairs to come act as the deponent. We obtained some great intel on why our radiators don't work well at Tara (turns out they get a form of arterial sclerosis if they're not cleaned out periodically, and I'm confident ours at Tara haven't been serviced since the Harding administration), then in higher spirits with a belly full of microwaved cheese and cabernet, found ourselves back on the road to Issac and Olivia's place.

Enough travelogue for today. A few days ago I was reading a book by Alan Lightman, a theoretical physicist who teaches at MIT and spends lots of time thinking about our human interaction with the world colored by the light of things like quantum physics. I've always admired the humility and insight of his work (can there be insight without a little humility?), and his interdisciplinary approach to his subjects.

On this particular evening he touched on gestalt psychology, which teaches us that humans perceive the world holistically, seeking and finding patterns and filling in voids as our minds try to make sense of the world. As explained in his book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine,

Sorry for the lousy cropping--the digital book wouldn't let me copy text, and I didn't feel like re-typing it.

Lightman's observation struck me as perhaps explaining why I've been so out-of-sorts lately, and periodically for the last four years or so. Hurricanes, pandemics, wandering between the beach and the farm and the Upstate. There's no rhythm of life, no pattern for stitching together a day. All is disorientation, ad hoc experience with no teleological arc to any of it. I can't tell you what I want out of life, except that I sense this isn't it, that the dysphoria haunting me these days is a response to daily stimulus that defies routine, a life marked by loss of control of my time, of my life.

Of course, control is an illusion, isn't it? A way to make an irrational existence feel rational. But that illusion may hold the key to a life that feels right because the structure constructed by our minds creates the comfort of a rational pattern, a cadence. Without it, we just pinball from bumper to flipper to bumper, along for the ride in our own life, which is the only thing we really have.

So, there's your psychobabble and reductionist nonsense, all rolled into one narrative with a travel story woven in for good measure. Feels like a good time to find some solid food, and get myself to work for a little catching up before the second of my five mediations this week.