psychology

We build our own prison walls, and breaking free starts in heart

By David McElroy · April 9, 2019

This is a day when I want to quietly slip away and disappear.

I don’t want to tell anybody what I’m doing. I don’t want to warn anybody. I just want to cut off the people I’ve known. The people I’ve loved. The people I’ve counted on. The people who’ve disappointed me.

I have these days occasionally. I never know ahead of time when they’re going to show up, but they always feel the same way — and they’re more frequent lately. I always feel like selling everything I own and loading up the car with Lucy and the cats and taking off for a place where nobody knows me.

It doesn’t feel like a desire to run away from a problem or from a responsibility. It’s not a sense of defeat or anything like that. It’s more like a sense of escaping from a prison I’ve built for myself. It’s like a sense that I’ve been waiting in a port for someone to arrive — someone who said, “don’t give up on me” — but that person has never arrived, so I’m leaving to find a new life instead.

If you knew when you would die, would that affect how you lived?

By David McElroy · April 8, 2019

I hadn’t talked to Brett in at least 10 years, but I used to know him pretty well. I can still hear his voice and see him laughing at the dinner table when we ate at his house. He was married to my sister until their divorce, so he was the father of my two nieces. I got along with him fine and he always treated me well.

I got a message from my sister Sunday to say that Brett had died unexpectedly of a heart attack about three weeks ago. It was a surprise because he was fairly young and had always been in great health, as far as I knew.

The news made me uncomfortable, simply because other people’s deaths remind me how fragile all life is — including my own.

I read a news article Saturday about new software that can analyze a person’s health and then use artificial intelligence to predict when he’s going to die. The software was said to predict a person’s death with “unsettling accuracy.”

That led me to wonder something. If some sort of software or divination could accurately predict the date and time of my death, how would it affect the way I live today?

When I came home from a late lunch this afternoon, there were six or eight people gathered in the front yard of a house a couple of doors down from me. They were all dressed up, as though they had been to church for Easter and hadn’t yet changed. An older couple just moved into that house and I haven’t met them yet, but it seemed that they were with their son or daughter, maybe a sibling, and a couple of very young children. They were taking pictures and it took me back to my own childhood, visiting my grandparents in fancy Easter clothes and smiling for pictures in their yard. Holidays such as Easter and Christmas remind me in a small way of why I want a family. I wish I’d had a wife and children to be taking pictures with this afternoon. I still hope to experience that. And I hope you enjoyed your Easter Sunday, whether it was filled with a loving family or not.

I came home late Saturday afternoon to find that somebody had cut my grass while I was gone — and I had no idea who to thank. I walked around the neighborhood asking if anybody saw what happened, and I finally figured out it was my neighbor, Pedro. (That’s not his real name, but I’ve told you about him before.) He was cutting his own grass and did mine while he was at it. He even swept my walkway and porch steps. And he didn’t want any payment. He said it was no big deal. When I hear bigots talk about how we don’t need any more Hispanic immigrants and hear idiocy such as the notion that “we’re full,” I find myself thinking how much worse off I’d be without people such as Pedro. I’m grateful for his giving spirit. He’s a great neighbor.

I get a lot of email from people asking for advice. I don’t always have time to respond, but when I do, I like to remind them that the only reason I can offer any advice is that I’ve lived through so many of my own mistakes. In the coming weeks, I’m going to start putting out a series of short videos to answer some of the most common questions that I receive. I already have dozens of questions to choose from, but if you have a question that you think might be applicable to others, be sure to drop me an email. If I end up using some portion of your question, I won’t include personally identifiable details. I don’t know when the first video will go live, but I’ll be in the studio working on them.

Modern culture disturbs me. Sane lives are mocked and insane ideas are celebrated. I just read a story about a woman in England who “married herself” in 2015. A man had chosen another woman over her, so her response was to show everybody that she had no need for a partner — and she had a “wedding” with a dozen bridesmaids and they all danced around in the street as she “married herself,” with some guy dressed like a high-church priest. Nothing says, “I didn’t really need you,” like this sort of bizarre exhibition, huh? The woman then wrote a novel about a woman who married herself. None of this will affect me, of course. We’ve always had iconoclasts. I’m a bit of one myself. But it seems as though modern culture has become one huge freak show — and it seems unhealthy.

There’s a little girl at the table next to me at dinner Thursday evening who makes me happy. She’s a second grader and I heard her telling her grandmother, “I have a thousand books and I’m going to read all of them.” A few minutes later, she asked her grandmother, “What does stupendous mean?” (I’m not sure I would have known that word in the second grade.) At one point, I asked her if she likes to read and her eyes lit up. “I’m going to write my own books,” she said. I don’t know what this little lady’s future is, but it made me happy to talk to such a bright and enthusiastic girl.