Rock or Lion?

Every morning, while my uncle hitched the ancient farm horse to the cart, my grandmother would come out of the kitchen to supervise. "That horse," she would say, shaking her head,"is going to kill somebody one of these days." No matter that the horse hadn't broken into a trot within living memory: disaster could strike at any time.

Years later, I am in college and living at home. I am warming up the engine of my Renault Dauphine to get to my morning class across Birmingham, Alabama, when my mother runs out of the house and thrusts a hard-boiled egg through the driver's side window. "Here. Eat this on the way. You don't want to faint at the wheel and cause a tragedy." No matter that I have never fainted in my life, but it is best to be prepared.

Both my grandmother and my mother had lived through the terrors of the Spanish Civil War, so they had an excuse for their hyper vigilance. And they were convinced that it worked: after all, the cart horse never did kill anybody, and I never fainted at the wheel of that tiny car.

Unlike my mother and grandmother, however, I have led a peaceful existence, free (so far) from wars and other disasters. So there is no apparent reason for my own deep-seated conviction that it is only my constant watchfulness that keeps the world from falling to pieces.

Here is what goes through my mind on a routine trip to the market. At this season in Vermont the roads are rife with cyclists. What if one of them swerves in front of my car? What if, in the fruit aisle, the grapes I put in my cart are contaminated with a deadly bacterium? What if, at the checkout, I find out that our credit card's been hacked and we are now penniless?

When he was an old man, Mark Twain said that he had lived through many catastrophes, most of which never happened. Like the women in my family, Twain suffered from what scientists call the "negativity bias," a tendency towards pessimism and anxiety engraved in our DNA over millions of years by natural selection.

Say you are an early human wandering on the African savanna. Behind a tree in the distance, you see a beige-colored mass. It could be a rock, or it could be a lion. If you optimistically assume that it is a rock but it turns out to be a lion, you and your potential descendants are toast. If, on the other hand, you are an anxious type like Mark Twain, you will take to your heels immediately and, regardless of what the beige object actually turns out to be, you will live to pass on your genes, which will include a tendency to expect the worst.

The problem in our time is that, with lions on the wane, the negativity bias causes unwarranted stress and militates against the health and well being of millions of us modern Cassandras. It may even work against reproductive success, since deciding to become a parent requires at least a modicum of optimism. So the lesson for people like me might be to learn to imagine fewer lions, and trust in the ubiquitousness of rocks.

But the thing is that, for both optimists and Cassandras alike, there will ultimately be a lion behind the tree. It will be no use pretending that it is a rock, or hoping that it is old and toothless. That lion will catch us no matter how fast we flee.The closer I get to that final encounter, the more I think that the trick is not to run or struggle, but to face the beast and respectfully ask it to deliver the killing bite as quickly and kindly as possible.

J.S. Bach And Holiday Stress

I don't know about you, but a lot of Christmas music makes me nervous. I hear Jingle Bells and my breath begins to tighten, and the Rudolf song gives me the jitters. It's because of the association, over endless decades, of these tunes with stores, and gifts, and Time's winged chariot hovering near, plus the anxiety of finding perfect gifts for all the perfect people on my list.

So to destress these days, I put on some Bach. Bach without words is best. Bach without organs or harpsichords. Stripped down Bach, Bach for horse hair on cat gut: the Cello Suites.

The great Pau Casals, who discovered the long-forgotten Suites and performed them as no one else has, when he was in his 90s and couldn't play the cello anymore would play a single Suite on the piano every morning, as a kind of meditation. Casals was something of a Zen master, although he didn't know it, and the Suites were his mantra.

Bach has always induced a meditative state in me. I remember when I was in college, coming home in the afternoon and listening to the Brandenburg Concertos. “Why do you always play that record?” my mother asked one day. “It puts things back in order for me,” I told her.

Now that life is considerably more complicated, it takes the Suites to put things in order for me. But they always work, for reasons that I can't understand. And they work especially well in this, the most disordered of seasons.

Speaking of disorder, can you imagine what Bach's Christmases must have been like? With 20 children in the house? And little Johann Christian and Carl Philipp Emanuel tootling on flutes and the lady of the house, Anna Magdalena, practicing her harpsichord? Sure, he had two wives, but only one at a time (his first wife died young). And he didn't have a ton of money. How did he manage to write such peace-inducing music, in the midst of all that chaos?

Maybe in the coming days, when there will be a mere eight of us at our house, I can channel Bach, and keep my wits about me.