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just talking to a good friend or watching Marx brothers movies (or even doing nothing at all), criterion 2 becomes important. Here we face a problem that hangs like an albatross around the neck of the entire profession of clinical psychology and that has drawn, if you will, an iron curtain between clinicians and experimentalists—there is very little experimental evidence that therapeutic techniques really work in the sense of criterion 2. I do not go as far as psychiatrist Thomas Szasz in his claim that mental illnesses are all socially constructed, nor do I accept all of clinical psychologist Tana Dineen’s arguments that the “psychology industry” is “manufacturing victims” in order to feed its ever-growing economic juggernaut. But Szasz and especially Dineen (and social psychologist Carol Tavris in a much more reasoned approach) have injected a badly needed dose of skepticism into a field flooded with flapdoodle.

Sports psychology has its fair share of the same, as I discovered in my journeys as a cyclist and a scientist, and both practitioners and participants would be well advised to step back and ask themselves if criterion 1 (the art) is good enough and, if not, how criterion 2 (the science) can become attainable. Did all the psychological exercises I tried “work” for me in the Race Across America? It is impossible to say, because I was a subject pool of one and there were no controls. When I wanted them to work, it seemed like they did, and maybe that’s good enough. Yet I cannot help but wonder if a few more hours in the training saddle every day might have made a bigger difference. Sports can be psychological, but they are first and foremost physical. Although body and mind are integrated, I would caution not to put mind above body.

7

Shadowlands

Science and Spirit in Life and Death

SIXTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, in a cave 132 feet deep cut into the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, 250 miles north of Baghdad at a site called Shanidar, the body of a Neanderthal man was carefully buried in a cave, on a bed of evergreen boughs, on his left side, head to the south, facing west, and covered in flowers, so identified through microscopic analysis of the surviving pollens. Already in the grave were an infant and two women. The flowers were from eight different species and the arrangement was not accidental. There was a purpose to the burial process. It is the earliest memorial celebration of life and mourning of death of which we know.

Now that Neanderthals are extinct, we are the only species who is aware of its own mortality. Death is an inescapable end to life. Every organism that has ever lived has died. There are no exceptions. Behind every one of the 6.2 billion people now living lie seventeen others in the ground, for 106 billion, according to the demographer Carl Haub, is the total number of humans who have ever lived. Our future is sealed by our past.

Thus, we are faced with the existential question that has haunted everyone who has thought about this uncomfortable fact of life: Why are we here? People throughout the ages and around the world, in all cultures and communities, have devised a remarkable variety of answers to this question. Indeed, anthropologists estimate that over the past ten thousand years humans have created roughly ten thousand different religions, the wellspring of which may be found in the answers they have offered to that soul-jarring question: Why are we here?

I started thinking hard about this question in 1992, when my mother started acting strange—she was confused a lot of the time, disoriented, and emotionally unstable. Since my folks had just been dealt a significant financial blow, I thought that perhaps this triggered her erratic behavior because she grew up in the Depression and always feared that she would be destitute again. I spent countless hours talking to her, as did her sister, her friends, and my dad. I escorted her on long walks in hopes that some physical exercise might release some mood-elevating endorphins.

Months passed with no sign of improvement, so