There Are No Cheerful Hearts in the Nursing Home

Several people have been nice to ask why The Cheerful Heart suddenly shut down production. There are three reasons, which we'll tackle one at a time.

Shortly after my last entry, my mother, who lives in West Virginia, (I'm in Maryland) woke up unable to walk or even get out of bed. She, Irene, is 92 years old and lives on her own in her own apartment in Parkersburg, WV. She takes care of herself, reads many books, plays bridge two or three times a week, watches game shows on television and makes meals from the food I bring to her to warm up in the microwave. Or I say she did, for she is no longer able to do so.

She went to the emergency room where she was diagnosed as having a heart problem. Please. A ninety-two year old lady shows up with paralysis on her right side, difficulty in walking, difficulty using her right hand and right foot and the emergency room physician sends her home with heart medecine? It's a stroke, you dimwit! By now my sister was with her, she spent the night and in the morning what was obviously a small stroke had become a large stroke and she was doomed. The next trip to the emergency room turned up the evidence with a CAT scan. Stroke. Pretty much total paralysis on the right side, at least as far as her arm and leg are concerned. She was then taken to Charleston, West Virginia where my sister lives, to the hospital, cared for and eventually moved to the nicest nursing home in the city, where she is today.

She is in hell. And there's almost nothing anyone can do about it. And so are her children: my sister, myself and my brother. In our own particular kind of hell.

Welcome to the Cheerful Heart.

The point here, in this blog, is not to detail the pain and suffering of the inhabitants, and the staff at the Oak Ridge Nursing home. (Though I think I will probably do so; it is a situation that begs to be written about). My mother is not the first nor will she be the last to endure these sufferings. I have long thought that everyone in the U.S. above the age of 12 should be taken to a nursing home and forced to spend the day, observing the poor poor people who are there, in their wheelchairs, clutching their baby dolls, chanting their pleas for help, trying to eat, trying to get better, trying to go home, most with no homes to go to, trying, trying to scrape together some semblance of a life, or death. And being unable to put together either. It is so sad.

So where is the Cheerful Heart? Since Grandma fell ill, I have visited a number of times, taking my children and my niece to see her. They all love her and it has cheered my heart to watch them with her. They are unfailingly kind to her, unafraid to sit and talk and do what she needs done without flinching or backing away. They were brought up well, a credit to my wife and myself, my sister and her husband, my brother and his wife. Or perhaps all children are good if we can only let them be so. At any rate, they love their grandma and they show it. Others who roll along in the hallway of then home in their wheelchairs are not so fortunate. There are 78, one wants to call them inmates, but that is too harsh. The staff tells me that half of them get no visitors at all. Ever. Most of them are terribly wounded from their physical afflictions. Many of them have been driven mad by their... incarceration. There I go again.

So what can I do? I pushed my mother in her chair into the sun last week, in the morning. Should I drop you a line? she asked. Yes, I answered. Will you write me back, she asked. Yes, of course. Do you know where I live? Yes, I know where you live.

Where do I live, she asked. Where do I live?

What It Is; What It Isn't

Word of the day to expunge: Hate

As in – I hate George Bush.

Or – I hate Barack Obama.

OK – I hate racists.

OK – I hate those little black flies you find in the woods in New England who bite me on the head and leave big welts.

The Basic Tenet: The Cheerful heart is the default position of the human spirit. Envision the heart-o-meter and notice that there is an ordinary toggle switch. One side is labeled “Cheerful” the other, “Angry.” When we are born, the switch is set on Cheerful. Moving it to Angry is something we do to ourselves, either because we seek out the Angry Way or we succumb to its preponderant, inescapable presence. But we're the ones who flip the switch. Being perpetually angry is learned behavior, which can be brought about by actively searching out those things that make us angry. It is an addiction of a sort. Its causes are many, not least among them that those people who seek out this anger do so because they then find themselves feeling more “alive” when they are in the throes of this particular passion. They feel more important; as if they matter more to the greater good, to their country, their church and their fellow sufferers. This is a false belief. But we are surrounded by people and media who would lead us down that route, for it is to their advantage when we succumb. Resist them. Avoid them.

What the Cheerful Heart will not do, (necessarily).

Bring you love.

Bring world peace.

Bring you money.

Impart a Big Secret.

Make you smarter.

Make you better looking.

Help you lose weight.

Sober up.

What it will do:

Make you happier.

Calm you down.

Free up some time formally wasted on being angry.

Act as a shield against easy anger.

The Cheerful Heart does not go around seeking happiness and good cheer. It's not an active search for things that make us feel good. It is an attempt to exorcise those things in life that make us unhappy. If they can't be exorcised, then they should at least be avoided. If they can't be avoided, we hope that having a cheerful heart will help protect us from the corrosive acids of anger that eat away at our spirit.

A friend of mine who was a great martial artist in some obscure form of hand-to-hand combat once told me that the first move a warrior must make in a fight is to take a step back. That's what I'm suggesting: when faced with anger, take a step back. Do not engage. It will only please your enemy if you do. And smile. Rely on your Cheerful Heart. It drives them crazy.

Politics: Please Stop Yelling at Me.

People to Avoid This Week: Rabid Republicans, Deluded Democrats. Crazed Conservatives, Lunatic Liberals.

I've been putting off this entry because it dredges up just what the Cheerful Heart attempts to avoid: Anger. But really, the Cheerful Heart blog was born from my struggles with friends and family who feel it is their mission to convince me, and those like me, that their political views are truly right (and I use that word on purpose) and unless I, and my ilk, don't see the error of our ways, the country, the economy, my family and my own personal self and soul are doomed.

If you haven't guessed it by now, I am a liberal in most things, and those who badger me are conservatives. I have very few friends of this persuasion, although I am surrounded with a passel of in-laws who espouse these views. A few of them understand how I feel and don't push their views on me. For that I am grateful. I guess there are extremist liberals who pelt their family with rabid political missives, but I don't know any. Really, let's be honest, those portly folks with the red faces, men or women, poking their fingers in some politician's direction and shouting at the top of their lungs are almost always conservatives of one stripe or another. Tea baggers. Haters. Whatever.

As I age, and those around me age, I find that these people, the ones who spend their time on politics, watching political shows on TV and listening to ranters on the radio, have grown more and more bitter about their lives. When they retire it opens up vast new spans of time for them to cruise the Internet searching for kindred souls and new people and ideas to hate. These are not, necessarily, stupid people, some of them are quite smart, but being folk of little introspection, and being limited as far as intellectual pursuits are concerned (art, music, writing), and not even having much in the way of hobbies they sieze upon the one thing that they are really good at, the thing that makes them feel most alive: hating. Anger. Fury. It gives them satisfaction of the smug sort, allows them to look down on entire classes of people, to feel superior, usually after a lifetime of feeling inferior. It gives them purpose.

They are sad, little people. And I could feel some pity if their seemingly God-given purpose in life wasn't to attempt to enlist me in their cause by sending intellectually purulent, angry material that would be laughable were it not so mean spirited. Years ago when I would get these ridiculous messages in my in-box, I would run them by Snopes.com, and respond to the senders with the truth and a gentle admonition to check the veracity of the info they were sending out. Were these attempts to help them not make public fools of themselves met with gratitude? Never. Only sneering rejoinders like, “Well, it may not be exactly true, but it ought to be true!” (All quotes are real.) No thanks for straightening out a misconception, just more invective, more hate because even they knew they looked faintly, or blatantly ridiculous, unable, or, really, unwilling to apply even the commonest of sense, or simply check with a real authority.

After awhile I saw that any attempt to stem this tide was a lost cause, so I asked these posters to quit sending me any political material. I was interested in their families, their well being, but not their political or religious opinions. They were unable to stop themselves. “Well, just don't click to open it!” they said. “You don't have to read it!” (They always speak in either explanation points or ALL CAPS. They have no notions of Internet etiquette. Even here they point fingers and shout.) Or they would agree to desist. By the next day more would come in. I realized then that they were so Internet un-savvy that they probably didn't understand how to remove someone from their great swaths of addresses. I told them, gently, how to do so. I received back more invective because I was, “Trying to tell them what to do.”

Here's the only thing you can do, you seekers of the Cheerful Heart: block them from your computer. Completely. Irrevocably. Trust me, if someone gets sick, or there's bad news, they, or someone else will call you on the telephone.

This is the only way to keep their hard, black little souls from infecting your Cheerful Heart. Seal them away as you would any pathogen.

They can't stop themselves. If they didn't have their hate, they would have nothing.

And Then it Snowed

Warning! This entry contains references to a smiling baby.

People to Avoid This Week: All those morons who say these heavy snowfalls prove that there is no such thing as Global Warming.

The Cheerful Heart is not a think-yourself-happy blog. It is a place for exploring strategies to simply not be angry. I am suggesting that if we are not angry, we will be cheerful. Maybe not actively happy, certainly not happy all the time. But cheerful is a pretty good place to start, to be, whenever possible.

It was a few hours before the oncoming Big Snowstorm and I was headed into the 12 Items or Fewer line at the grocery store when a young lady pushing a cart with a baby and at least 40 items rushed in line in front of me. She was chatting on a cell phone. She moved around to the front of the cart and began piling her items onto the belt. The checker said not a word about the number of items, they never do. Nor did anyone in the long line behind me (all of whom had fewer than 12 items). Over the years I have learned not to express my righteous indignation. It never helps when I do and aften gets me into trouble.

The cashier finished ringing up the items. The woman took out her money. She had what looked like to me, around 30 dollars. The checker began subtracting items, slowly, one by one, discussing the merit and worth of each item as they went. I was not happy.

The strategy of this blog is to avoid anger-producing situations, but there was no getting out of this one. I decided to look at the baby, rather than cast furious glares at the woman. The baby and I stared at each other.

He smiled.

No, the clouds did not part, there was no shaft of brilliant sunshine. The birds did not begin to sing. I was still angry at the woman who put herself above everyone else and still didn't have the brains to check her money beforehand and keep a running tally in her mind as she shopped. But I smiled back and had a thought.

The baby had no particular reason to smile at me except, perhaps, because he naturally had a cheerful heart. Sure, it's not a bed of roses being a baby, you depend on others for food and keeping you clean, you have to cry to get anyone's attention, there are few things you can do to amuse yourself, but maybe you are so un advanced that you're just naturally happy. That the default setting for our hearts, as a species, is Cheerful. Rather than Angry, or Suspicious.

Perhaps there is an evolutionary reason that simple cheerfulness is a good strategy to enhance and propagate the species. I'm sure that 50,000 years ago early man had plenty to be afraid of, that fear was a natural response to a difficult environment, but I wonder, if there were moments when the tribe sat around the fire, they've had enough food, nothing was actively trying to eat them and they just felt good about things? I'm betting yes. I enjoyed this mental image.

The woman paid her bill, and pushed her cart out the door. I bought my items, went to the liquor store for a bottle of Gin, the Drink of the Cheerful Heart. As I was climbing into my car, I noticed the woman pulling out of her parking space. She had abandoned her cart in the middle of the street, not even pushing it to the side out of the way of traffic. I got out and moved the cart to the cart corral. I didn't do it for the woman, she still pissed me off. I didn't really do it for the people who were having to dodge the cart in their cars. I didn't even do it because I'm basically a nice person who goes around doing good deeds. I did it for the kid. And the smile that made me think of other things for at least a few minutes. And while I was distracted, my heart forgot about the selfish woman and clicked onto its default setting: Cheerful. And I thought about that stone age tribe, sitting around, doing whatever the hell they did when they were happy.

I went home, it snowed, a lot, I had a drink and it was a good evening.

Is It Only Me?

About a year ago I began to notice how often I was angry. I would read the newspaper and it would make me angry. Television made me angry. I would open my e-mail and I would get even angrier. Work made me angry. I would talk to my friends and I would get angry because they were all angry about one thing or another. It felt, when I really thought about it, that my heart was becoming this small hard thing, black, like a lump of coal. But there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it; it was always there, in the background, the anger, lurking, just waiting to flare up.

Then one day something happened. I'm a writer, I work alone, in the basement. I start every day by looking at Garrison Keiler's Writer's Almanac, which features a few paragraphs about various writers and a poem. On December 24^th the poem was by Gary Johnson, structured as a small prayer of the Christian variety, the sort of thing you might say when sitting down at the table before eating. Now, I don't do prayer. I really dislike most forms of established religion. This is a topic I will get into in another entry, but suffice it to say, I am not inclined toward the concept that folks refer to as God. But there was a line in the poem that caught my eye. “Grant to us a cheerful heart.” I'd like to say at that at this moment the scales fell from my eyes, and I became a changed man, but that didn't happen. But this simple phrase did seem to lodge itself somewhere in my consciousness. Kind of like a song that gets stuck in your head. I could hear it echoing around at odd times, surfacing when I didn't expect it; I'd push the words around the way writers do, admiring the simple strength of the phrase. And I know this is going to sound stupid, but somehow, someway, just saying it in my mind made me feel better. Not a lot better, but just a tiny bit better. Kind of like repeating a mantra is helpful to some people. When I came face to face with something I knew was going to make me angry, I did not engage it, I simply said to myself, "Nope, not going to participate. I have a cheerful heart." Kind of goofy, huh? But like I said, I felt better.

So I decided to explore that small feeling, to see if I could make it grow. I wasn't fishing for happiness exactly, I just didn't want to be angry anymore.

I wanted to have a cheerful heart.

I started working on that goal. Nothing big; I didn't get up early to see the sun rise, walk around whistling, buy a puppy or gaze enraptured at scenes from nature. I didn't pray. I didn't quit my job and run off anywhere. What I did was, every day, I tried to simply remove those things that I thought were fueling my anger. For example, if one of my whacky in-laws sent me an e-mail that I could tell from the subject line was going to be an attempt to convert me to their angry conservative mind-set (Obama is a Traitor!) I just deleted it without reading. Boink. When I read the newspaper, I skipped the stories that were the type that would make me angry, that were designed to make angry: Man Shouts Down President! Looters Roam and Kill! Creationists Win Court Battle! Nope. Sorry. I refuse to participate. When some moron talking head on television started yammering away in high dudgeon, I changed the channel. Ditto with the radio. When my conversations with friends and family began to veer in the direction of indignation, I changed the subject. There were other things, lots of them, small things that I began to avoid. After I got pretty good at that, I started adding in a little awareness of the small things that I actually liked. And you know what? I started to feel better. At first, just a little bit, but the feeling grew. And it's growing still. I find, and again I know it sounds simplistic, maybe just a little bit dopey, I can have a cheerful heart. Or at least a heart that's more cheerful than it was a month ago, certainly more than a year ago. Nothing else happened, I didn't win the lottery or get what I wished for. There is no Secret. But I feel better. I didn't start this project because I wanted to be happy, but that's what has happened.

Does anyone else feel the way I did? Like you're just bone tired of having to fight, that you're tired of being angry, that much of the country seems allied against you, that people, at least certain groups of people, hate you, want to change you, want to defeat you? That you're surrounded by haters and shouters?

Would anyone else out there like to have a more cheerful heart?

That's what I want to discuss here. That's what I will discuss here.

I have some ideas that might help.

Stay tuned. Come back soon.