I am not Eliot Spitzer!

Don’t ask if forgiveness is even possible.
Forget others: One never forgives oneself!

December 13, 2008 will be an important date in my life, in my world, and also in the life of my legally-wedded wife. Golden wedding anniversary, they call it?

Eliot Spitzer of New York did just recently what I did 22 years ago. I publicly asked forgiveness for having led another life - for as long as 25 of the 28 my wife and I had been married to each other at that time.

My wife and our two children had known over those years that my frequent trips away from home were not purely business-related trips.

These trips were my way of finding time elsewhere, often thousands of kilometres away, with some one else in my life. At times, these trips were close to my family home, and with me was “the other woman” from far away.

In my own small way, wherever I had lived, like Eliot Spitzer, I had been a public figure.

Unlike Spitzer, I never ever had to pay any woman for sex or any other favours. All the women in my life were only too happy to spend time with me, often sharing with me whatever we spent on luxury holidays, and even on some simple trips to not-too-expensive spots.

The women in my out-of-wedlock world were never one-night-stands. Relationships had lasted months, years, and in one case for 18 years. Strange bondings that often reflected the influence of Van Gogh’s Lust for Life.

My wife and kids had never been part of my life all those years when I had been on various voyages. I close my eyes and see once again what mattered for me in those years:

Live life, See the world, Gamble away nights on the Strip in Las Vegas or in Atlantic City, Monte Carlo or Macau. I went out to discover joys. Music, theatre, ballets, opera, art vernissages and wine tasting sessions, poetic soirees. Summer sailings from Perpignan to the Spanish coast, two nights as guest of the Chogyal of Sikkim when Hope Cook was at home there. Splendid nights camping out in the deserts near Bamiyan, in the shadows of Herat, near monasteries in Solo Khumbu, listening to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on deserted beaches close to the Russian border in Trabzon. Winding my way through hukkah-and-hooris spots in Istanbul alleys, taking in comforting, caressing warm hands in a perfumed bath tub in Makati suburbs, queuing up to buy a 50 kopek ticket at the Bolshoi in Moscow, or laughing away through a champagne-dinner watching American and Japanese eyes ogling at the beauties of the Moulin Rouge. Holding someone tight during the highs and lows of the long Space Mountain ride in Florida’s Magic Kingdom, or when scuba diving off the Koh Samui coast.

My mission all those years was:
Make some one happy.
Take joy in making that loved one happy.

In that quest, as I found out many many years later, I had lost track of my own wedded life. While my own wife had gone through life lonely, isolated, depressed, and unloved. My children’s father was never around when they needed him most.

In those years I had earned the dubious, not-too-flattering title: casseur des coeurs.

Never for a moment in all those years did I ever feel the slightest sense of guilt.
I owed it to myself, I kept telling myself.
Had I not kept track of what was happening back home?
Did I ever forget to mail a cheque to my wife every month?
What about those visits when I would pick up the kids and take them for a brief holiday?
No remorse. No regret.

One fine day I finally went back to the family, trying to put together broken pieces of my family life. Years later, I finally asked forgiveness.
That was 22 years ago.

* Some 17 years had passed when son and I were attending a group therapy session on the art of living. He was asked to tell class about the one event that mattered most in his life. He looked at me and told the class of 60 attending:
I see myself as a six year old in tears, on top of the tiger-striped taxi, pleading papa not to go away from home with “that lady”.

* Last month, in the middle of the night, my 47 year old daughter called up long distance from the Far East and anxiously asked:
Papa, tell me now you are looking after maman? Is she alright?

Twenty two years after I had asked for forgiveness.

That brings me to a key question: Does forgiveness really work?

In Eliot Spitzer’s terse resignation announcement yesterday, with wife Silda by his side - her face such an anguished open book that CNN's Wolf Blitzer commented "that woman has aged in three days" as Mr. Spitzer uttered those words:
"I have begun to atone for my private failings with my wife, Silda, our children, . ...
The remorse I feel will always be with me," and
"Words cannot describe how grateful I am for the love and compassion they have shown me," amounted to a small essay on forgiveness.

Let me say this here and now:
Underneath all the chatter about Spitzer's spectacular fall from grace and his wife's obvious pain lurks a very human dilemma.
What if it were me? Would my wife forgive me?

Forgiveness, researchers say, is a very long and delicate process.
We hear talk about Spitzer’s atonement, his remorse …
I say it's a very long and winding road indeed.

It takes over 22 years, I can tell you.

Just Nobody Now
justnobodynow@gmail.com

How can anyone wish pain for anyone?

Some 60 years ago they said that women don’t suffer because they can cry over the pain, or the cause of their pain. They said that men suffer because they don’t cry.

Some men suffer more than others. There are men who do cry. Yet they continue to suffer.

Le mal humain has made me suffer ever since I can remember. When the Allies celebrated victory, I went into the shell. I was unable to muster courage and strength to express disgust at the manner in which man made others suffer. War was the cause of misery and pain. Little did it matter who was right, who wrong. There was pain on both sides. With them, I suffered.

During my posting, many years later, at a US army kasserne in Munich, Germany for “Ferienarbeit,” the journalist in me led me to Dachau. Within hours I needed medical attention. Then followed several days of motherly care given by a senior hospital matron. The body’s system could not retain even the smallest morsel of food forced on me. I went into ascetic silence.

Why, I asked, why does man cause so much pain.

The visuals in Dachau haunt me to this day.


MARCH 2007, over 40 years after my deep Dachau angst, I chanced upon a weekend feature about a family in Bird Cove, Newfoundland in Canada’s Globe and Mail. Carolyn Abraham had the story of two of Verna Mahar’s three sons, most of all the eldest, Owen.

“From the time Owen was a baby he was a roughhouser -- banging his head against walls and table corners without a whimper. When he was a toddler he'd bite his fingers to the bone unless she made him wear mittens indoors. His lips she could do nothing about: Owen chewed them happily until they bled.”

Verna was perplexed.

"My husband and I didn't understand it. He didn't cry for nothing. We couldn't understand why he wasn't feeling."

"Didn't it hurt?" she'd ask the growing boy.

"No," Owen would say.

"Well why not?"

"I don't know, Ma."

The Globe and Mail report had a picture in which Owen Mahar held up a family photo of himself as a toddler. In the photo he wore mittens to protect him from chewing his fingers.

Verna and Tom Mahar, of Bird Cove, Newfoundland, have three children, and two of them have inherited two defective genes that cause the very rare condition called Congenital Indifference to Pain, or CIP.

Not until Owen was 3 -- the year he broke a bone in his foot and kept right on walking -- did the family receive an explanation. Doctors told them their son had a rare and storied disorder -- a genetic condition that prevents the ability to perceive pain. He is normal in every other way, able to distinguish hot from cold and pat from pinprick; only the sensation of pain does not register.

Owen registered no pain. For me, reading about Owen was painful.

Carolyn Abraham’s report though had a consoling side to it: Only 15 worldwide were known to be affected by congenital indifference to pain, or CIP, including Owen, now 20, and his brother Joshua. These patients have suffered without suffering -- double hip dislocations, lower-limb amputations, corneal abrasions, burns, stabs, gashes, head trauma and mutilating tongue-biting. A Swiss woman has experienced painless childbirth; one U.S. patient was able to undergo a cystoscopy, a painful exploratory bladder procedure, without anesthetic.

Researchers have discovered that primarily one gene has such a profound effect. James Henry, a renowned neurophysiologist who has studied pain for 30 years (not involved in this particular discovery) , said the unexpected importance of this single gene marks a "monumental turning point in our understanding of pain."

Scientists hope for the 20 to 30 per cent of the world's population who suffer chronic pain, "the discovery of this single gene may be a miracle if it can be translated into a new therapy."

Many disorders result in pain insensitivities, including leprosy and other conditions that leave patients unable to sweat or even sense when they have go to the bathroom. But an indifference to pain alone is much rarer.

There are only six or seven people left in Bird Cove who, like Owen Mahar, are in their 20s.

"I would have been gone long ago as well if I could go," Owen said. But he can't stand much longer than a few minutes and he can't sleep. And now, it's Owen who has a wish. "I wish I didn't feel pain any more."

Over the years, the mutant gene has meant he can feel pain.

And over all these years I have cried for those in pain. I wish there was no pain.

I wish there is no pain for Owens everywhere,
for those caught in ethnic violence in Africa,
in the long battles in Middle East,
in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan,
in America-ravaged Iraq,
and now in China-persecuted Tibet.

Just Nobody Now
justnobodynow@gmail.com

Sometimes, It's Good To Be Nobody

A management guru recently wrote this piece:

Credentials are a fact of life, whether they are degrees, certificates, diplomas, titles or any other qualification or symbolic merit badge. All have their place. They help us to feel confident and encourage others to have confidence in us. They verify our education and experience, support our case to be allowed to lead or manage and tell others that they can rely on our expertise.

Where credentials get in the way is when a person becomes preoccupied or even obsessed with them. Then they start to lose their identity and become that credential instead. They only feel like a 'somebody' because they have the right credentials and so allow that part of their identity to become bigger than all the rest.

At work, at home and even at play, they can't separate their real selves from their assumed, credential-based identity. They wear it like a cloak. It becomes their brand.

So, are you a "somebody" — or a "something?"

When someone becomes their credentials, they keep on reminding you of it — in formal meetings, in informal gatherings, in water-cooler conversations, with clients and other stakeholders, outside of work and even when out shopping.

Their conversations and their interactions are driven by their need for recognition and acknowledgment. To feel emotionally secure, they need to be seen as "somebody."
Yet this "somebody" is based less on asking, "Do you know who I am?" than it is on inquiring, "Do you recognize the credential that I possess?" As a result, the person becomes a "something" — a set of inanimate credentials - instead of the "somebody" they so long to be.

Even the response to the question, "What do you do?" is an "I am…" statement. A "be-ing," not a "do-ing." Because they are their credentials, "who I am" becomes "a qualified engineer," "a French professor," "an accountant with 30-years experience, "a project manager", "a banker", or "a Ph.D in physics," not Maya, or Rehman, or David D'Souza.

But why do you even need to be anybody?

What would it be like to consciously choose to be a "nobody", to be who and what you are without the need to back it up with some written diploma or proof of expertise?

To allow yourself to explore and be curious about what you see in yourself?

To be a nobody and show up authentically without the crutch of the credential?

What would it feel like if you went through an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, even a lifetime, without needing to be somebody at all?

Just show up as who you are right here and right now, in all your authentic humanity?

It might look like you are ready to own your mistakes -and not blame others for errors.

It might allow you to own your embarrassment, your shyness, and your vulnerability - and support you to guard against any tendency to become "too big for your britches," or come across as arrogant, holier-than-thou, or super(wo)man.

Best of all, if you decided to shed any cloak of fakeness, phoniness, and pretending, you might allow yourself more often to say "I don't know." or "What do you think?"

What else?

Well, as a "nobody," you could learn to become more interested in others and let go of our ego. You could become more inclusive in thought, word, and deed; more open and accepting — operating with the notion that "I am one of you," and "We are in this together for our mutual good."

Being a "nobody" would let you seek to understand before being understood; to stand back, inquire, observe and listen; to walk for a while in others' shoes.

You could let go of power, status, title, and qualifications, moving away from desiring always to be center stage — maybe even move to being behind the scenes.It would be okay – even refreshing - not to be "the expert," and become servant rather than master.

Finally, being a nobody would help you become flexible rather than rigid; to get out of your own way; to become quieter, more self-reflective and more self-observant.

In a word, humble.

Being authentic in your life at work means accepting, simply, "I am me." Not, "I am my job" or "I am my credential."

Just me.

Being a nobody means looking up at the vast, vast Universe and knowing that none of us are at the center of it, - Regardless even of our loftiest credentials. Just Nobody

That's why here and now I decide, I'll be better off, being JUST NOBODY NOW!

justnobodynow@gmail.com