Achieving Flow

 

CC Jean Stimmell

I noted with great sadness the passing of the man with the unpronounceable name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the pathbreaking book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.^⁠1 He was influential in my life, along with some of my patients, particularly overly-conscientious, workaholic teachers and business executives who, after studying his book, became more effortlessly productive while rekindling  joy and happiness in their lives.

In this seminal work, written in 1990, he used the term “Flow” to describe the sense of creativity that emerges from an intense absorption in a challenging activity, whether in the arts, sports, business, or a hobby.

 We’ve  all experienced it: being wholly absorbed in the activity at hand, being so involved in it that we lose our our sense of time or even our sense of self. This state of being is what folks are describing when they say they’re in the zone or in the groove. His book was about what makes this happen and how to get more of it.

It's not rocket science, according to him: "Talking to a friend, reading to a child, playing with a pet, or mowing the lawn can each produce flow, provided you find the challenge in what you are doing and then focus on doing it as best you can." The crucial point is that Flow doesn't just randomly happen; we make it happen.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Csikszentmihalyi described flow as totally focused, "completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.^⁠2 .”

Deep focus is central to Csíkszentmihályi's notion of Flow, the opposite of that old cliche, "going with the flow," which too often is an excuse for apathy and indifference. When properly understood, Flow is a profound concept integral to spiritual and religious practice.

This notion finds its strongest voice in Taoist and Buddhist traditions. As it is for Csikszentmihalyi, the core idea is not to force or grasp our way through life but instead live life spontaneously, in harmony with the natural order. Rather than doing nothing, it is about connecting to an effortless flow by connecting deeply with what we love. Then we are not doing a task; we are becoming it.

In many ways, as a society, we are going in the wrong direction: In an interview in 1986, he blamed television for the decline in hobbies, avocations, and lifelong education that blend aspects of both work and play. According to him, such pursuits promote Flow and, as a consequence, happiness.^⁠3  Unfortunately, if we were to equate the distraction of watching TV in 1986 to having a beer after work, the distraction of the internet today is like mainlining heroin 24/7.

One bright sport is how we as a society are turning on to mindful living, meditation, and paying attention to the present moment. Linda Stone asserts that paying attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. But it all depends on how we use it. We can enhance it with passionate practices, diffuse it  with technologies like the internet, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. But, in the end, we have no one else to blame: "we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.”^⁠4  

xxx 

¹ Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

³ https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/04/science/concentration-is-likened-to-euphoric-states-of-mind.html?searchResultPosition=12

⁴ http://www.lindastone.net

Solitude, though much-maligned, can be a blissful reset

Solitude on Pleasant Pond in Deerfield

As I wrote in my last column(Monitor 10/24/21): Besieged by a perfect storm of unsettling events beyond my control, I took refuge in solitude. 

Such a course of action can be a way of escaping responsibility and avoiding relationships. But it can produce a positive function as Buddhist writer, Steven Batchelor, points out, providing the time and space to develop the inner calm and autonomy needed to engage effectively and creatively with the world. Moments of quiet contemplation, whether before a work of art or while observing your breath, allow you to rethink what your life is about and reflect on what matters most for you.^⁠1

Finding space for solitude is getting more difficult because the  internet and social media are intruding into every facet of our lives. Pamela Paul, in her new book, “100 things We’ve Lost to the Internet,^⁠2” documents these losses.

By no means does that make our wired world all bad; it has revolutionized communication and taken a lot of drudgery out of our lives. The plethora of news and data I can effortlessly plug into on my phone, updated to the moment, would be beyond Walter Cronkite’s wildest dreams.

 I love the internet for that ability, but it comes at an enormous cost: A whole way of life has been lost, things we thought were timeless. 

As a review in the Kirkus Review stated, From handwritten letters to quiet, unoccupied moments, cursive writing to vacations without work (or email), school librarians to newspapers, LPs to mixtapes to the notion of “closure”—so much we thought eternal is quaintly antiquarian or gone forever.^⁠3  Worse yet is how the internet and social media have sullied our character and morality as a nation, orchestrating an alarming nosedive in civility, empathy, and the very notion of what constitutes the truth.

In my personal life, another infuriating downside is the constant buzz of electronic noise, driving me crazy like trying to garden at the height of the black fly season. I’ve had to swat these pests aside for the sake of my sanity. Like Nancy Reagan, I  just said no.

That’s also the core message in Pamela Paul’s new book: We are not puppets: we can make choices – and we must. Especially in our private  lives, we don’t have to adopt every new technology: We can go back to what we used to do before the internet. And for younger individuals, who grew up in the digital age, it’s important to explore alternative ways of being. 

The choices I have made are tailored to my personality. I’m all in with email and search engines but boycott Facebook and Twitter. I avoid texting because the alert ‘beep’ of an arriving message breaks my concentration. Studies have shown that after such a distraction, it takes almost 30 minutes to get back on task – at my age, with memory already faulty, I don’t need that!

Noteworthy individuals throughout history have sought out solitude, not just curmudgeons like me. For instance,  Wordsworth equated solitude with bliss: For oft when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.^⁠4

Michel Montaigne, a French lawyer and civil servant, lived in times more deranged than ours,  confronting not only a plague but having to avoid being murdered by warring religious factions. He retreated to his  library to explore what’s really important in life by writing his timeless essays, including this passage: 

We must take the soul back and withdraw it into itself; that is the real solitude, which may be enjoyed in the midst of cities and the courts of kings; but it is best enjoyed alone.^⁠5

Most important, Batchelor emphasizes, solitude is not a momentary escape but  “a practice, a way of life.^⁠6 One takes up the practice not to become creative or smart but to feel complete without wants, merging inconspicuously into the fabric of life itself. He emphasizes the importance of this point by quoting Buddha, who, when looking back on his life, discovered that his first experience of solitude was a premonition to what was to come:  

“Once, while my father...was at work, I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree. Untroubled by sensual desires or unskillful ideas, I entered into and dwelled in the first meditation, which is accompanied by thought and reflection, by rapture and well-being born of solitude. Could that be the way?”^⁠7 

Could that be the way for us as a society, too?  Less internet extroversion and more soulful introversion. According to writer Natalie Goldberg, such stillness is the road to happiness:

You don’t do happiness. You receive it. It’s like a water table under the earth. Available to everyone but we can only tap it, have it run up through us, with our stillness.^⁠8 

xxx

¹ Batchelor, Stephen. The Art of Solitude . Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.(loc 76)

² 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul (Penguin Random House; 2021)

³ www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/pamela-paul/100-things-weve-lost-to-the-internet/

⁴ Batchelor

⁵ https://www.theculturium.com/michel-de-montaigne-on-solitude/

⁶ Batchelor, loc 37

⁷ Batchelor, loc 950

⁸ The True Secret of Writing by Natarlie Goldberg

Tending

Hull of the sunflower seed riding atop its green shoot

Looking back now, I see I’ve been a bit adrift since retiring from my psychotherapy practice. At first, I took up the slack by writing columns to the Concord Monitor readership, whom I view as friends and neighbors. Recently, I’ve taken a break from writing due to a perfect storm of events: an ongoing spell of ill health combined with a deadening malaise from the existential perils that confront us from climate change, Covid resistance, and escalating threats to our democratic way of life. I’ve taken refuge in solitude, meditation, and tending my garden: doing a little each day in my mind and in my yard composting crops gone by, tilling the earth and planting cover crops to protect and nourish the soil.

I ran across a blog by a wise woman, Maia Duerr^⁠1, who helped me make sense of what was flailing around in my head: "Lately one of my favorite words is a verb: tending. I find myself saying it a lot. In nearly every instance I’m trying to remind myself the importance of taking care of something, whether that’s my heart, my body a relationship, or the land I live on.” Her words awakened me into accepting how much of my life had revolved around tending to my patients. And how, since my retirement, I have been casting around looking for a suitable substitute.

Maia defines “tending” in terms of tending a fire:  "giving a fire the elements it needs to thrive, making sure there is enough wood but also enough space and oxygen. Keeping an eye on it, moving things around as it begins to die down so that it can spark back into life.” That’s what I attempted to do for my patients, and it was always a miraculous sensation, watching a patient sparking back into life. It’s the same sense of wonder mixed with reverence I feel watching a green shoot spring out of the ground from a withered, dry, seed.

Maia tells us the root of the word “tending” is related to intention "to in-tend something is to hold that thing in our heart/mind with an energy that calls it into reality.”  That simple statement, for me, was like turning on a floodlight, illuminating my problem and offering a solution. 

Where to put my intention? That is the question. Like a ship lost at sea, I must chart a course to where I want to sail to. In Maia’s words: “What are you stretching yourself toward, what are you intending for the precious days of your life, however many you have left?” At this point, I don’t have solid answers to these questions but will follow Maia’s advice to be kind to myself by creating the space to allow these questions to unfold.

It also occurs to me that her question is universal for all of us to ponder during these difficult times, no matter our circumstances. Facing the truly monumental threats of climate change, Covid, and the unraveling of our country, it would be easy to become so depressed, we give up, pulling the covers up over our heads. But we can’t do that, any more than we can stop feeding our family or watering our garden! We have to keep tending those that we love, not only our family and friends but extend ourselves outward to tend to our country and the natural world beyond. The question isn’t if we will tend to things but which ones will they be – and with what motivation. 

Intentions, positive and well as negative, forge energy that create their own reality. The best we can do, I think, is make intentions based on tending to others. Such intentions empower us, manifesting our higher selves, giving us the gift of knowing we are doing all we can to create a more wholesome and relational world.

xxx

¹ October Full Moon: Tending to Your Life: www.maiaduerr.com

The humbled poppies connect to life and death, war and peace.

"Remembrance Day" by belkin59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

When I think of poppies, I think of wearing  the red crepe paper poppies distributed by the American Legion Auxiliary on Memorial Day to honor the sacrifice of our fellow Americans who served and died for our country. That is until I read a mind-blowing essay by Katrina Vandenberg in the current edition of Orion Magazine.  It made me think more deeply about our unconscious connections to the rhythms of nature – including war – and other mysteries beyond my feeble understanding.

Opium poppies  have been cultivated by humans, going back to our earliest civilizations in Neolithic times. The plant has been long-revered for relieving suffering at the most fraught passages in a person’s life: birth and death. But it’s not a one-sided story. The poppy is the door to many realms, good and bad, as the author notes: The door “swings open-closed, life-death, pleasure-pain, freedom-slavery, remember-forget, suffer-release and when not swinging, it lives on is threshold, ready.”

The threshold state for poppies is unique because unlike most plants, they don’t grow every year: They can lay dormant for up to 100 years, waiting for the ground to be disturbed. Thus, when the fields of Flanders were ripped open and shredded by artillery and trench digging during World War One, poppies sprang to life, transforming the barren land into fields of blood-red blossoms, growing around the bodies of the fallen soldiers. That’s the back story of how the poppy came to symbolize the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of soldiers  mowed down during that brutal war.

Poppies are remarkable in other ways: Out of the tens of thousands of plants on the earth, only one, the opium poppy, can produce morphine in measurable quantities. Morphine, distilled from the poppy’s opium, is also unique: it is the only molecule in nature that has “evolved to fit key-in-lock into the receptors we have in our brains and spines” to provide pain relief and, in other circumstances, pleasure.

Following Michael Pollan's thesis in "The Botany of Desire," Vandenberg asserts our relationship with the poppy is reciprocal: "that plants domesticate us at the same time we domesticate them, and that they evolve to respond to basic human yearnings." The mystery of the poppy, to her, is that this plant, unique from all others, has learned "what we most desire to feel.” 

This essay is not meant to be an ode to morphine which can be a hopelessly addicting and life-destroying drug, even more so now that science has invented synthetic morphine compounds, like oxycodone and fentanyl, which are hundreds of times more addicting. No, this essay is an ode to the reality that life is often a mystery beyond human understanding.

Poppies are a good example. The author's claim, backed by Michael Pollan, boggles the brain: that opium poppies have co-evolved with us, learning what we most desire to feel.  Also unnerving is the poppy's ability to awaken from hibernation when disturbed by war to bloom in profusion as red as a fallen soldier's blood.

Other mysteries: Can it be only happenstance that we have just lost a 20-year war to a small, third-world country festooned with opium poppies – which just happens to be our national symbol honoring our fallen heroes? And how can it be that after we spent $9 billion during this war to stamp out opium production,  poppy cultivation has not declined but skyrocketed?

The final mystery is the nature of war itself. We think of it as an abomination, an external enemy. But what if war is not outside of us but a part of who we are. That’s the viewpoint of James Hillman, the late, legendary Jungian psychologist.. He looks at war not through the lens of science or theology but from an understanding of mythology and archetypal psychology. What he asserts seems undeniable: “where else in human experience, except in the throes of ardor – that strange coupling of love with war – do we find ourselves transported’ to such a mythical place.^⁠⁠1

To resist our instinctual urge to rush to war, the first step is not denial but admitting we have a problem, that war is part of our DNA. Society already understands how to control unbridled sexual passion and lust by establishing norms, customs, and rituals, to restrain and redirect these urges in socially acceptable directions. We could do the same with war, but we don’t. 

Worse, we have done the opposite: loosening prohibitions, even becoming cheerleaders for war. Already, with our troops still taking their boots off from Afghanistan, pundits and politicians are talking up our next war.

That’s the terrible truth of war: the biggest mystery of all,

xxx

^{1 2} A Terrible Love of War by James Hillman, page 9

Thoughts on 9/11 and what our wars since WW II have cost us

 

Courtesy of Vietnam Veterans Against the War: 1987

Rather than treating 9/11 like the criminal conspiracy it was, we got bogged down in another land war in Asia – as disastrous as Vietnam. The whole world would have helped us locate Bin Laden, capture him, and  put him on trial as Israelis did with Adolf Eichmann.  Then, after we invaded Afghanistan and pushed Bin Laden out, The Taliban – which didn’t exist until we started meddling in Afghanistan – petitioned to surrender. But we spurned their offer, wanting a complete victory in the manner of a patriarchal father who thinks he knows what’s best for his children. Finally, compounding our folly, we invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. 

History is clear: As Jeremi Suri recently wrote in the NYT,  “We have thrown away our wealth and reputation fighting bad wars  – costly, protracted conflicts with self-defeating consequences – in Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places.^⁠1 “ He goes on to say that military force is not a substitute for the hard work of building representative and effective governments in these countries we have invaded. 

How true! Our emphasis on the military has had the same destabilizing effect inside our country, fraying our democracy and paralyzing Congress. Working and middle-class folks feel vulnerable and insecure, financially worse off than their parents. They believe government isn’t working for them. And they are right!

Since the 1970s, the gap between the poorest and wealthiest Americans has gotten exponentially worse, the middle class has shrunk, and our roads and bridges have fallen apart. Compared to other developed countries, we have the lowest life expectancy, the  highest poverty rate, and the worst safety net. 

Just as General Westmoreland always saw light at the end  of the tunnel during the Vietnam War, we think we are winning because the stock market continues to climb –  pretending the have-nots do not exist, climate change is a hoax and that systematic racism is a liberal plot.

The more we become disillusioned, the more we turn on each other. As I wrote in my last column, our institutions can’t function unless we have a consensual agreement about who we are as a people. Without that, we become a dysfunctional family where individual members all seek control, like selfish children.

I fear our dysfunction has reached a tipping point: major civil unrest looms on the horizon, perhaps the opening salvo to civil war. If you think it can’t happen, look no further than what happened in Rwanda between two similar ethnic groups, who had lived together and intermarried for generations. But inflamed by ethnic tension and fake news, the Hutus attacked the Tutsis with clubs and machetes, killing 800,000 in the space of 100 days.

How do we hold enough common ground to move forward, avoiding the temptation to descend into backbiting and recrimination? The magnitude of the task ahead came into clearer focus for me after reading John Buttrick’s My Turn piece in the Sunday Concord Monitor. He wrote about his daughters’ “serious distrust” of Joe Biden because “he frequently openly touched women without their consent.” 

As a 75-year-old man, who grew up when patriarchy ruled supreme, my whole life has been a re-education project – still ongoing. From the perspective of a recovering white male, I understand why these young women distrust Biden. As a progressive, I, too, have long distrusted Biden for many of his shifting centralist views. 

But my outlook has changed since the Trump-inspired insurrection on January 6^th,  along with his ongoing attempt to challenge the results of the last election and suppress voting in the next. If we imagined ourselves as a dysfunctional family under Trump, we now have another chance. We’ve elected a new president who wants to make government work again for the average citizen.

Joe Biden, warts and all, has had the political courage to get us out of Afghanistan, along with proposing the most sweeping legislation since the New Deal to lift up average Americans while, at the same time, protecting voter rights and women’s bodies. If democrats and forward-thinking republicans can pass this legislation, it will signal to disgruntled citizens that perhaps the government can work for them. But, to succeed, we will need all hands on deck!

Despite the significant distrust, harbored by so many of us on various issues, I believe it is time to suck it in and work together to hold the center to save our democracy. If we don't step forward now, the consequences will be dire,  expressed so well by Willian Butler Yates:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...

the best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”^⁠2

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/american-military-afghanistan.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20210831&instance_id=39209&nl=todaysheadlines®i_id=30753738&segment_id=67669&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

² The Second Coming, William Butler Yates

Without government we climb a ladder to nowhere.

Composite Photoshop of Pueblo Dwelling
in NM and Sumac on the coast of ME
CC Jean Stimmell

 

25 years of psychological research has proven how easy it is, by the process of suggestion, to get individuals to believe in things that never happened: In these experiments, “we see that people can come to believe that they were lost or that they took a hot air balloon ride or spilled punch on the parents of a bride at a wedding.^⁠1 Remarkably, even after being told that the memory is false, participants tend to keep on believing it.

Research shows how even family members growing up together can have different memories of the same event, sometimes radically different. In well-functioning families, dissimilar individual memories become blended into a master narrative that changes over time as circumstances change. Psychologist Coman at Princeton University tells us such memory convergence boosts group cohesion, by empowering self-worth and sense of belonging to a greater whole.^⁠2

Governments require the same group cohesion to function well. When I was growing up in the 1950s, our country had this bond: we were united,  proud to be Americans. By saying that, I’m not suggesting that America in the 1950s was necessarily fair or equal, just that a large majority was on the same page. 

Those of us growing up at that time were deeply idealistic. We, of course, became known as the sixties generation, and contrary to an unfair stereotype, loved our country. I remember how affected we were by JFK’s speech, challenging each of us to contribute in some way to the public good: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,”  The turmoil we caused in the 1960s was an expression of that idealism: We protested, not to tear things down but to demand that our government live up to its founding ideals.

Obviously, our nation has lost that optimistic idealism. One big reason is the nature of the news. Back in the day, the media was, for most, a single reality: most families got their news in the evening on one of 3 networks, all basically saying the same thing. Now social media has proliferated like the profusion of dandelions seeds from a single plant floating off into the air, dispersing a vast assortment of progeny, far and wide.

As psychologists have proven, it is so easy, by the power of suggestion, to convince folks that something happened that didn’t. Social media has blossomed to be a major accelerator of this process. If we add to the mix, Trump’s fake news, we have a perfect storm. 

While all politicians sometimes fib, Trump takes the cake, lying at least 30,000 times during his presidency. Before that, when running for president, he bombarded the democrats and Hillary Clinton with fake claims. Reputable sources like Kathleen Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that the barrage of Trump lies amplified by Russian meddling “very likely” swung the election to him.^⁠3

But Trump’s most dangerous lie isn’t his alone but a long-time republican talking point, that is scornful of JFK’s positive view of government.  The turning point came with Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981 when he laid down the gauntlet to democrats, declaring that "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." 

The republicans were on a roll. Glover Norquist followed up this offensive against government with this infamous bombshell: “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Considering all the factors I have listed, no wonder we are in disarray, unable to achieve a consensual narrative as to who we are as a nation. Divided into factions, we have become a dysfunctional family, consisting of individual factions like narcissistic children, all vying for control. It can’t last.  Without a functioning government, we climb a ladder to nowhere.

One thing is clear. While we may have many different agendas, we all must support our democratic form of government and work to make it better and stronger – not drown it in a bathtub.

xxx

¹ https://www.npr.org/transcripts/788422090

² https://www.nature.com/articles/543168a.pdf

³ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump

The Terrible Truth of War

 

Statue of nurse and soldier, next to the Vietnam War Memorial

 by OZinOH under CC BY-NC 2.0 license.

Another war, another debacle, egged on by the usual suspects: the military-industrial complex who got rich from it;  the news media who gained readership from it;  Republicans who flaunted their manhood with it, and Democrats who feared being called ‘wussies’ if they opposed it.

What sheep! Three days after the U.S was attacked on 9/11, Congress adopted a knee-jerk, open-ended authorization to attack terrorists that is still in effect. Barbara Lee was the only lawmaker who dared to vote no, which subjected her to almost universal verbal venom, even physical threats. “People were calling me a traitor, she said, “But I knew then that it was going to set the stage for perpetual war.” And that’s exactly what happened.^⁠1 We will go to our graves calling them ‘forever wars.’

Despite spending more on the military than the next 11 countries combined, what good has it done us? We’ve ended up like a carpenter with only a hammer, mistaking every problem as a nail to smash. A day of reckoning is coming. Just look at the last two countries that attempted to maintain an empire through military might. England and The Soviet Union exhausted themselves financially, and worse, their one-pointed obsession with military power depleted their creativity vitality as a nation.

Already pundits are debating “how can we pivot from our fight in Afghanistan to our next war?” 

To break this cycle, we first must recognize what war really is. For a fresh perspective , let’s consult the late, legendary, Jungian psychologist, James Hillman. He said, in essence, war is an aphrodisiac: “where else in human experience, except in the throes of ardor – that strange coupling of love with war – do we find ourselves transported’ to such a mythical place.^⁠2

The first step in resisting the rush to war is to understand the irrational nature of this ‘terrible truth:” Because war erupts from a primal state of passion, we must use our cognitive facilities of reason to counteract it. It has worked in the past. Hillman was ‘encouraged by the courage of culture, even in the dark ages, to withstand war…to work to understand it better, delay it longer…”^⁠3

How do we build such cultural courage? In other areas, we’ve established a long track record of controlling our passions. All societies, for instance, have learned to establish norms, customs, rituals, and laws to restrain unbridled sexual passion. In our own country, in the last 50 years alone, we have made major strides by passing laws and raising public awareness to reduce sexual victimization by broadening the definition of what constitutes rape, abuse, and sexual harassment.

Yet when it comes to war, our politicians and mass media have done the opposite: loosening prohibitions, even becoming cheerleaders for war. As Hillman observed, ‘War’ is becoming more normalized every day. 

The Afghanistan War is a good example: Things could have been much different if calmer heads had prevailed. Within weeks of starting our intensive bombing campaign in November of 2001, the Taliban’s bravado faded: they became “a spent force” as they fled from Kabul into the mountains. At that point, “[t]he Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time.^⁠4

Mission accomplished, right? Al Qaeda had been driven out and the Taliban defeated. 

Not quite. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, still in the heat of war lust – rather than negotiating a surrender –went in for the kill, vowing to exterminate the Taliban. Toward that end, over the last 20 years, it has cost us over 2 trillion dollars, killed 2400 of our young American servicemen and women, and wounded another 20,000.  To say nothing of countless civilian casualties.

Now we are witnessing, The Taliban – far from being destroyed – marching triumphantly back into Kabul, without a shot being fired. I think there is a lesson in this somehow.

xxx

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/22/us/as-afghanistan-collapses-a-lament-for-repeating-the-same-mistakes.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20210823&instance_id=38584&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=66983&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

² A Terrible Love of War by James Hillman, page 9

³ Ibid, page 22

⁴ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/world/middleeast/afghanistan-taliban-deal-united-states.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20210823&instance_id=38584&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=66983&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92