Barrett Dorko
24-12-2005, 03:38 PM
It’s been a quiet week in Cuyahoga Falls…
In the recently published sequel to Puzo’s The Godfather Michael Corleone plans on taking his wife Kay to a movie matinee only to find the theater closed and the manager angrily dismissive of his request to have it opened. He takes the man aside, and then returns a couple minutes later indicating that the projector is being set up and they can go in and sit down. When Kay looks at him quizzically he says, “It turns out we have a mutual friend.”
Friendship. It’s a beautiful thing. As I begin my first “News” here on Soma Simple it occurs to me that the friends I have acquired during the Internet boom are principally responsible for my landing here. They know I’m grateful, and I hope that they’ll see in my words a renewed commitment to the work.
As I drove to the restaurant I write in each morning that passage from The Godfather Returns came to me and soon after sitting down with my coffee I began to think of Milgram’s “six degrees of separation,” another thing I’ve been mulling over recently as I treated patients this past week. According to Wikipedia, the idea that everyone in the world was connected to everyone else by an average of just six acquaintances was first proposed by a Hungarian writer in 1929. The late Stanley Milgram, an influential and eccentric researcher and Harvard psychologist, demonstrated that this was true in 1967 and subsequent studies have further confirmed its veracity. As the Internet grows I’m sure the number will shrink. Of course, the definition of “acquaintance” has shifted as well.
Idly discussing this with a patient this week I heard myself saying, “It turns out that we’re all more intimately connected to strangers than we think. Perhaps there’s no such thing as a “perfect” stranger. In fact, I’m just one degree separated from the President, knowing someone he knows here in Cuyahoga Falls. Now knowing others is one thing, but many philosophers have written of the importance of knowing ourselves. What I find in my patients with persistent pain is a separation within. They are unacquainted with their own desire to move in a way that would be enduringly helpful. They don’t know their authentic, painless selves. My work is about manually connecting these two parts of the same person. It’s about reducing that degree of separation to zero.”
“Not bad,” I thought. Having heard the words emerge from the same part of my brain that tells me how to relieve my own pain, I decided to incorporate the analogy into my teaching, and maybe my writing. Maybe it will help connect me to others and, eventually, make it easier to ask things of them. Things like a location for my writing.
After all, it seemed to work for Michael Corleone.
In the recently published sequel to Puzo’s The Godfather Michael Corleone plans on taking his wife Kay to a movie matinee only to find the theater closed and the manager angrily dismissive of his request to have it opened. He takes the man aside, and then returns a couple minutes later indicating that the projector is being set up and they can go in and sit down. When Kay looks at him quizzically he says, “It turns out we have a mutual friend.”
Friendship. It’s a beautiful thing. As I begin my first “News” here on Soma Simple it occurs to me that the friends I have acquired during the Internet boom are principally responsible for my landing here. They know I’m grateful, and I hope that they’ll see in my words a renewed commitment to the work.
As I drove to the restaurant I write in each morning that passage from The Godfather Returns came to me and soon after sitting down with my coffee I began to think of Milgram’s “six degrees of separation,” another thing I’ve been mulling over recently as I treated patients this past week. According to Wikipedia, the idea that everyone in the world was connected to everyone else by an average of just six acquaintances was first proposed by a Hungarian writer in 1929. The late Stanley Milgram, an influential and eccentric researcher and Harvard psychologist, demonstrated that this was true in 1967 and subsequent studies have further confirmed its veracity. As the Internet grows I’m sure the number will shrink. Of course, the definition of “acquaintance” has shifted as well.
Idly discussing this with a patient this week I heard myself saying, “It turns out that we’re all more intimately connected to strangers than we think. Perhaps there’s no such thing as a “perfect” stranger. In fact, I’m just one degree separated from the President, knowing someone he knows here in Cuyahoga Falls. Now knowing others is one thing, but many philosophers have written of the importance of knowing ourselves. What I find in my patients with persistent pain is a separation within. They are unacquainted with their own desire to move in a way that would be enduringly helpful. They don’t know their authentic, painless selves. My work is about manually connecting these two parts of the same person. It’s about reducing that degree of separation to zero.”
“Not bad,” I thought. Having heard the words emerge from the same part of my brain that tells me how to relieve my own pain, I decided to incorporate the analogy into my teaching, and maybe my writing. Maybe it will help connect me to others and, eventually, make it easier to ask things of them. Things like a location for my writing.
After all, it seemed to work for Michael Corleone.