Photo credit: Photo by shadowfax the second on Flickr

My husband and I were having a discussion once about life, the universe and everything (not the book, although we've been known to discuss that too, but actual life, the universe and everything) when he told me that, for him, God is in choices. And I just loved the way he put that. (Darn that man for doing what people are always doing with my thoughts: summing them up much more succinctly than I can.)

You see, I believe that when I am open to God (the universe, my higher power, the light within myself, the divine, call it what you will), I see reality more clearly. I see beyond the artificial limits and constraints my mind puts on situations, and I'm able to recognize and pursue alternative solutions. (See how much more pithily he did it?)

Or to use (as I'm prone to) a sci-fi movie metaphor for the way I see things: think of the climax of one of the greatest movies ever made: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kirk and Khan are flying their spaceships around trying to kick the crap out of each other. Khan is using his super-intelligence to do some galactic scale ass whooping and Kirk (as usual) is in trouble. But in the end, Kirk is able to get the (literal) upper hand because he can think in three dimensions, while Khan (long trapped on the surface of Ceti Alpha Five) thinks in only two. It seems like a ridiculous premise that the super-intelligent Khan could forget, while flying a spaceship, that he could travel in any direction (even up and down!). However, it does allow God to be on the side of the Enterprise (so to speak, since my God is not on anyone's side), and a strangely lovable Shatner to gain the advantage over the sexy Ricardo Montalbon in battle. And after all, don't even the most super-intelligent of us sometimes forget we have other options because we're so used to doing things the way we have always done them?

Of course, you might say that in the Star Trek scenario, any one of Khan's crew could have yelled, "Hey, Khan! Don't forget that these ships fly up and down!" And Khan would have taken that into account and made a different decision. Then Kirk would have died a more respectable death than the way he was eventually (pointlessly) written out. (Oh, don't get me started on Kirk's demise in that Next Generation crossover movie! Sigh!) But in real life, having someone tell me that I have the option to make a choice doesn't actually make that choice any more real or available to me.

Why? Because we each live in our own Matrix of beliefs and assumptions. (Yes, I am pretty sure I have no way of explaining my spiritual vision of the universe without resorting to science or sci-fi metaphors.) If one of you all tells me, while I'm still living in the virtual reality world of the Matrix, "Hey, stand up on your own legs and breathe," I'll mutter, "I am, dumbass!" Because I don't know I'm in a bubble; as far as I know, I am on my own feet, breathing. It's that connection to God (or inner knowledge or call-it-what-you-will) that lets me start to see beyond the constraints I've placed around myself.

I'm on a journey -- toward growth, toward truth, toward a sustained connection with that God of mine -- and at every step, every fork in the road, every moment, every decision, I am doing the best I can with the knowledge and resources (physical, spiritual and emotional) I have available to me at that particular moment. I may look back and think, "If I knew then what I know now..." or "I should have...," but the truth is that I didn't know those things then or have the strength or see those choices from where I was at that moment. I could only have done something different if I were a different person, in a different place, than who I was and where I was. So every choice I make, odd as it sounds, is the best choice for me at the moment I'm making it.

And bringing this back around to Silda Spitzer, who started my thoughts in this direction: Silda Spitzer is a real-live grown-up, adult, big-girl-panties-wearing woman. If the decision to leave was truly available to her and she made the decision to stay, I may not know the reasons or may not have made the same decision myself, but I have to respect her decision.

If her choices were constrained by where she has been in this life and by who she is now, if she was unable to stand up to pressure or unable to see her needs as separate from Eliot Spitzer's or unable to see the difference between what she wants and what she is supposed to do, then that's where she is on her particular journey and I have to accept and respect that. No one can tell her what the Matrix is, and no one can force a red pill down her throat. If she was constrained by an inability to see other options as valid, maybe going up on a stage in front of the whole world by her husband's side is her way of taking the red pill she needs to escape into the real world.

So, the way I see it, the right thing for Silda Spitzer (or anyone else) to do is the thing she, as a unique individual, wants to do, and what she, as a unique individual, is capable of doing within the constraints she lives with at that particular moment. And the best thing I can do right now, as a woman, as a feminist, as a human, as the unique person I am at this moment, is offer my support and respect for the journey she is on.

Of course, I know that if you have a different set of beliefs about the world than I do, you certainly won't agree with those the last three paragraphs. But agree or not, what I really want to know is, how do you all see the world? Free will? People's choices? If you post on your own blog, let me know. (And feel free to use sci-fi metaphors so I can understand it.)

After the 2004 US presidential election, I was shocked and depressed. (Now, whether you agree with my politics or not, stay with me. As with so many things with me, it will all come back around.) I couldn't believe that after all of George W. Bush's dumbassery, after the way he'd frittered away the goodwill of the world and gotten us enmeshed in an endless, costly and pointless war in Iraq, after all his lies, that Americans were duped into handing the country over to him for another four years. The 2000 election I could discount -- after all, he hadn't even won the popular vote -- but this? Ok, John Kerry, not the greatest choice, but really, a monkey could do a better job than Bush. Why were so many Americans so freaking stupid? Why were they so blind to the facts? (At this point, my few conservative readers should be burning to tell me why I am wrong and my liberal readers will be saying, "Yeah, sing it, sister!")

In a desperate effort to understand how to get through to those boneheaded conservatives, I read Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, and (as sometimes happens) things far beyond the realm of politics became clear. Lakoff describes the difference between conservatives and progressives as a difference in how they see the world. Conservatives' core belief, Lakoff posits, is that people are essentially bad and only behave themselves out of fear of negative consequences. Liberals' core belief is that people are essentially good and will behave that way if they have proper love, nourishment and support.

Now, whatever you may think of that theory, it finally helped clarify for me why it was so hard to talk to my conservative friends and relatives. There we were going on at each other trying to marshal facts or shoot down the details of each other's arguments, trying to painstakingly explain what it was that was wrong about our opponents' positions, when the problem was that we were standing on two different (unexamined) foundations all along. We were starting from different places and were never going to understand each other until we stopped talking about the details of weapons of mass destruction and started talking about our beliefs at a much deeper level.

Conservatives weren't stupid or boneheadly unable to understand the facts, they were making decisions in a way that was completely in line with their values and beliefs, just as I was. What I saw as a fact, they saw as speculation and lies and vice versa, because each of us had different ways of arriving at our truth and different sources we trusted (or saw as suspect). And all of this came down to deeply held, unchangeable (at least by other people) core beliefs about life, the universe and everything. So, that initial "you're wrong" or "sing it, sister" you experienced away back in the first paragraph didn't come from an agreement about the specifics of George W. Bush's actual dumbassery (or lack thereof), but rather from the resonance (or lack thereof) of your core beliefs with mine.

Since this revelation, when I've disagreed with other people I try (not always successfully) to stop and remind myself that there is some the core belief on which we differ. (This was one of the things that inspired me to write my Views into my Room post.) And if I have built, or am building, a relationship with the person with whom I disagree, I'll work with them to figure out what that problematic core belief is. Of course, it's not always easy to find, because those beliefs are so woven into the fabric of our being that we forget they're there and get lost arguing over the specifics of a situation instead. At times I can see where I differ from someone else quite easily, and at others, it takes quite a bit of stumbling around and digging here and there to figure it out. (Unfortunately, that stumbling and digging can be a dangerous, and sometimes inadvertently hurtful, process.)

On my recent post on Silda Spitzer, several people (Vicarious Rising and Mantra on this blog and blue milk on my other) commented that they wondered if Silda Spitzer was doing what was right for her or what she felt she should do. And I thought, "Ah, but of course she was doing what was right for her. Even if she was bullied into it, it was right for her!"

Now if you feel the stirrings within you (as I suspect some of you will) of "what?! that's wrong!" then rest assured you and I see the world a different way, and there's no point in arguing over Silda Spitzer, because what is really at issue is the heart of what we believe about God and free will and human nature and the nature of reality and how the universe works. And maybe it is time to tell you (pulling threads together) what my God is (rather than what my God is not) and how I see myself (and Silda Spitzer and everyone else) fitting in to the scheme of the universe. I'll see what I can do for you tomorrow, with a minimum of stumbling and digging if I can.

Photo credit: Photo by MotherPie on Flickr

I was driving to pick one of my kids up from school for a dental appointment when I caught the words "prostitution ring" (just those two words) on the car radio and turned up the volume to find out who the latest outed addict was. That's the free association of my mind these days: prostitution ring to sex addiction.

As the week of media frenzy wound on, I followed the coverage of Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace in the most idle way. I would read or listen to things if I happened upon them, but I didn't seek them out. I would overhear talk shows on the car radio: ten or fifteen minute segments on the way to or from my daughter's preschool. Sometimes I'd catch a news headline pushed at me online or overhear conversations or get e-mail from folks (who know nothing of my husband's addiction or this blog) wanting to speculate or criticize. Often I'd stop reading or listening or turn off the radio because it was too painful or infuriating. I'd breathe and center myself.

I get so frustrated with myself that I am in a state of progress and not perfection when it comes to being sucked back into craziness on occasion. And on this occasion, the craziness, the pain and anger, didn't come from the Spitzers. I'd read or listen, looking for their voices between the lines. I'd listen for my own voice, the voice of someone who had been there and knew. Instead, what I heard, for the most part, were the ones and zeros of people talking in binary from inside the Matrix.

The voices that made me tremble most in rage, even misguided as I knew them to be, were the voices criticizing Silda Spitzer. Yet I was, with a different sex scandal, in a different place in my life, one of those voices. As a strong woman and a feminist, I was outraged, just absolutely disdainful of Hillary Clinton when the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. I wanted her to kick Bill in the crotch right in front of the press and send him to live on the streets while she got the White House. I was furious at Bill, furious at the image of men he represented, and I wanted that powerful woman, right there are the heart of things, to show him (and all men) that women would not stand by and quietly tolerate such behavior. And she did nothing, nothing except appear a little icier than usual. How I despised that woman. How could she betray women, betray me, that way? What kind of a message was that sending to men? To women? I certainly would never let my husband get away with that. (As if that were in my power.)

Some of my fury was born of fear, fear that men really are pigs and that the only way to control them is to let them know you're very serious about punishing them. It was born of not understanding my mother's life or choices. It was born of insecurity. It was born of not understanding what it really means to be strong or to be a feminist. The universe let me have my lesson a few years later when I found that my own husband is, like Bill Clinton (and Eliot Spitzer), a sex addict.

Needless to say, I don't see things quite the same way these days. I still feel rage (yes, yes, working on universal compassion, not there yet), but the target of that rage has changed. I see Silda Spitzer up on that stage, with the eyes of the world upon her, and I hear people say that they wish she weren't there or that she were visibly angry. I hear them say that she is sending the wrong message or that she's being used or that she should be thinking something different from whatever it is she's thinking. And I want to change myself into some avenging angel, covering Silda Spitzer gently with one great, silken wing while raining fire down on the press and fellow feminists and advice columnists and every possible incarnation of the old me. I want to shield and protect her, to heal her with whispers of the truth, and open the eyes of all the world with blazing pain.

Because here is how I see what happened to Silda Spitzer: There she was in the Governor's Mansion, maybe happy, maybe unhappy, who knows. What I do know is that she had a little pain or maybe just discomfort, a little twinge, let's say, in her arm. Some days it would hurt very much, some days she'd almost forget there was anything wrong. Maybe it never seemed serious enough to see a doctor about, or maybe she was afraid of doctors or what they might find.

Then one day someone walked up to her and shouted, "Good lord! Your arm is infected! It's rotting off your body!" And ripped her arm off her body and threw it to the floor. Now writhing in pain and shock, she's asked what she wants to do with the arm. A moment ago it was part of her body, part of herself, something essential to her life. The arm may have caused her problems and pain, it may be causing her pain now to see how infected the arm was, how close it was to killing her, how hideous and disfigured it had been without her ever noticing. Yet it was still her arm.

Now all the world looks at her and judges what she does next. (Bastards.)

What kind of message was Silda Spitzer sending? The message that she and Eliot Spitzer are human beings, in enormous pain, worthy of compassion, understanding and love.

What ought she to have done? Whatever, in that blinding pain and shock, she did was what she ought to have done.

If she had spit on and kicked that arm, or thrown that infected thing in the trash, I would have understood. And if she kicked Eliot Spitzer in the crotch at that press conference or walked off the stage or just not come at all, I would have said, "You go, girl. You do what you need to do right now." But if she cradled that arm for a moment and wondered if it could be reattached or healed or just buried properly, I would have understood that too. And when she did show up and walk away with Eliot Spitzer, hand in hand, I said (softly), "You go, girl. You do what you need to do right now."

I spent the week of the Spitzer news frenzy busy with major events in my own household, and now that I finally have time to sit with the story, it's old news, gone from the collective consciousness. Eliot and Silda have now retired (one hopes) to their separate church basements to build something new and beautiful from the smoldering remains of their old lives. And the news media has moved on: first to the (gasp!) shocking idea that America has problems with racism and then to the (gasp!) surprising fact that soldiers continue to fight and die in Iraq.

Throughout every bit of coverage I heard of the Spitzer story, I wanted nothing more than to be the expert commentator on the news. I wanted to call in to every talk show and write to every newspaper. I wanted to chime in on discussions with acquaintances who don't know of my husband's addiction. I wanted to tell everyone how way, way, way off the mark they were in their analysis. I wanted to shake America and wake it up. My only comfort, if one could call it that, was the knowledge that there will always be other sex scandals. (And when the next one breaks, I'll just be able to change the names in this post and put it up again.)

Over and over again, I heard the same question I asked my husband when I (like the people in Eliot Spitzer's life) was knocked on my ass by revelations of his sexual exploits: Why? Why? Why?

Why would someone so smart do something so stupid? Why would someone who spent his life prosecuting just these kinds of criminals engage in criminal behavior himself? Why would he do something that would destroy his career and his marriage? Why was someone who seemed so doggedly true to his principles abandon them? Why?

Unfortunately for my husband, who hates this habit of mine, I'm going to use science as a metaphor yet again and coin my own term for the analysis of the Spitzer scandal: Ptolemaic. Thanks to a wonderful high school science teacher, I have a vivid (if limited) knowledge of the history of astronomy, which goes something like this: long ago, Ptolemy theorized that the Earth was the stationary center of the universe and that everything in the sky revolved around it in perfect circles. He, and others after him, observed the motion of the stars and found that some of the stars (planets) traveled in irregular paths across the sky, occasionally looping back on themselves. Unable to conceive of a universe in which the Earth was not the center or in which the planets traveled in anything other than perfect circles, Ptolemy created an incredibly complex model of celestial bodies traveling in circles within circles to explain their observed motion in the sky.

Later, Copernicus theorized that the Earth revolved around the Sun. His model explained the movements of the stars just as well as Ptolemy's but was much simpler. But Kepler perfected the model by proposing that planets travel in elliptical, rather than circular, orbits. Now with the Earth and the other planets in the solar system all traveling neatly around the Sun in elliptical orbits, all the complexities, all the circles within circles, disappeared: there was just one simple, elegant path for each object.

So as I watched all the speculation flying around Spitzer's behavior, I began feeling very much like Kepler to the news media's Ptolemy. There were countless convoluted attempts to answer the perpetual "why." There were the absurdly partisan (liberals are perverts); the stupidly misogynistic (Silda Spitzer is a frigid bitch); the simplistically moralistic (Eliot Spitzer is a corrupt hypocrite (read: bad person)); the underestimating excusers (all men do it -- or want to) who usually joined forces with the amateur philosophers (absolute power corrupts absolutely) to conclude, with Ptolemaic finesse, that Spitzer was just doing what all men want to do because he was powerful enough to think he could get away with it.

Admittedly, some of those folks (ahem, Liberals are Perverts, I'm talking to you!) seemed to be speculating about the stars without even glancing at the sky. Still, many of these theories, like Ptolemy's, did their job of explaining the observable data. Yet, also like Ptolemy's, they all had to keep adding circles to explain pieces here and there that didn't quite fit. Each theory would make sense until one considered some other bit of data. So that, in the end, they all ended up drawing circles within circles trying to explain the irregular movements of planet Spitzer.

Of course, there is a solution of Kepleresque elegance: Eliot Spitzer is a sex addict. He had sex with prostitutes, even though he knew it would destroy him, because he couldn't stop. Power didn't corrupt him, he was drawn to power to fill the same void he sought to fill with prostitutes. (I have no doubt that both compulsive sexual activity and a desire for power pre-dates his governorship -- and his marriage -- by decades.)

We've come a long way in the awareness of alcoholism. While it is still viewed at times as a moral failing or a failure of willpower, I don't think we'd be suffering the same sense of collective national confusion over Eliot Spitzer's actions if he'd given speeches drunk or passed out at a state dinner. We wouldn't ask the question, "Why would such a smart man do such a stupid thing? Why would he endanger his career by drinking so much?" New analysts wouldn't say, "Everyone wants to drink on the job, he was just powerful enough to think the rules didn't apply to him." We'd know he was an alcoholic, that his drinking was compulsive and and that he was unable to control it. And instead of endless analysis, we'd get education in the form of a token lecture on alcoholism by an Oprah-approved physician.

Yet we puzzle over Eliot Spitzer's sexual behavior, assuming that he could control it, but chose not to. We ask ourselves why he would choose not to and find we can't reconcile his private behavior with his public persona. We draw circles within circles to explain it, when the answer is much simpler, if only we give up the need for an Earth-centered universe filled with perfect circles or the image of Eliot Spitzer as a mentally healthy person making, and able to act on, rational choices.