The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [64]
Consider another perspective. The man being interviewed on Oprah, Jim MacLaren, tells us that he used to be a football player but while on his motorcycle he was hit by a New York City bus and lost his leg. At first his life seemed over, but he refound life, retrained himself as a runner with a high-tech new leg, and became a champion in his new sport. Then one day he was riding his bike on what was supposed to be a closed track and a van plowed into him. This time he was informed at the hospital that he would never again feel or move from the neck down. He doubted he could refind life yet again, but, from his stair-climbing, cool-looking, high-tech wheelchair, he beamed at the audience that life had indeed refound him, that he has worked hard and regained some marked limb movement, and that his purpose now is to spread a message of motivation and optimism. His second accident was a further blessing; he is at last at true peace. Oprah asks, Did you really need the second accident to get there? Oh yes, he says. I needed to sit down.
The reason I tell you this story at this juncture is that Oprah asked him to speak to the period after he was released from the hospital, paralyzed, and before the time he re-embraced life. Yes, he responded, with a nod of responsible contrition, when the second accident happened, depressed and suicidal, he left home and spent nine months in Hawaii on a cocaine binge. Hawaii and cocaine, he explained, was what he liked as far as locations and drugs went, and he stayed with it until he stopped wanting to, which happened when he found himself talking to people who were not there. Scared and tired of it, he came back to the mainland and cleaned up. As his story was framed here, a man of amazing inner resources has admitted to a period of failure, disowned it, and returned his narrative to one of strength and gratitude for life. A more integrated story could be told from this same drama, wherein a man hit so hard by life that he might not have ever recovered found that he was able to use drugs to attain a period of rest, unreality, and euphoria. During this time he was able to come to terms with his new situation, and invoke, once again, his amazing inner resources. The drugs were no error; they allowed the man’s salvation.
Doctors confronted by a patient in profound, understandable sorrow used to give the patient opium, and as our historical doctors tell us, some of these patients limited their use of the drugs to what made life bearable. A lot of people nursed mild, pleasurable addictions. It was considered good for you. If a despondent woman—say, her husband was shot dead in front of her and died in her arms—refused to take a happiness narcotic, something that gives you a burst of euphoria, her doctor would strongly suggest she change her mind and take the drug. If she was unable to care for her child under this treatment, relatives could be asked to take the child in until the mother regained her strength. If the woman would not relent, the doctor would explain that her misery would break down her health and that if she wanted to be there for her daughter later in life, now she needed rest and respite. Then she would be weaned off the drugs. Remember the woman whom William James quoted, the one who tried all the narcotics, and all the diets, but nothing really worked for her until she embraced the “mind cure”? Presumably she liked or needed the narcotics for a while, and then stopped.
Creatures from outer space who could see the inhabitants of Earth but not hear us would see similar behavior from the people of both centuries. However, if all they could do was hear the people of both centuries, they would judge the cultures to be completely different. This splitting the view between sight and sound doesn’t bear much further inspection, but it is an evocative notion here. All I am trying to say is: See how people act? That’s how people act.