Episode 23: Mindfulness and the Aerial View

Welcome to wisdom from the area of view, the podcast of those who wish to learn how to crush their anxiety and find meaning and purpose in their lives. Today, I'm going to do something a little different. Usually Mark and I talk about what we're going to talk about, but I said to him yesterday, said, no, I'm not going to tell you what we're going to talk about because I have something that I want to talk about today. And I'm to start it this way. If you will indulge me, Dr. Klein, I want to talk today about music. music. The emotions evoked by music don't just feel good, they're healthy for you too. In her article in Psychology Today, Ralph Rybeck, MD, wrote about a meta-analysis of 400 music studies that found that listening to music has the ability to reduce anxiety, fight depression, and boost the immune system. Clinical music therapists even have started popping up prescribing music for everything from Alzheimer's to autism spectrum disorder in addition to other treatment courses, of course. Okay, so why am I talking about that? Well, I usually tell stories, but I want to tell a story today. I have a very dear friend, we've been friends for well over 40 years, we've actually business partners for many, many years, and she has developed what they call mild cognitive impairment. She's on the road to dementia, genetics play a great role in that, and she's got a terrible family history of that. And she is slowly going on that journey to never never land But I don't give up and one of the things that I tried to do was to talk to her About looking at things in a different light. I Tried to get her to think about things from the aerial view. I wanted her to realize that her life was still worth living and That things weren't as bad as she thought they were And I wanted her to to think about looking at it in a more positive light. And it just wasn't happening. Mark knows me very well. One of the things that I do all the time is I sing. I just like to sing. Music has been a part of my life for as long as I've been alive. And so one day I put some music on and I had a really long discussion with her about seeing things differently, about where she fit in the larger scheme of things and how things weren't as bad as they say they were. And she was listening to the music.

And all of sudden I could see her change. I don't know what it was. I think the music helped put her in that space that took her from the street view to the aerial view. And last night, she actually sent me a text message that said, you know, I've been thinking about what you were saying. And she said, I've just been looking back over my life and I'm seeing things in a different way now. And she said, she's now in an assisted living facility. And she said, she went to the art studio yesterday and started painting and sent me some of her paintings. And I didn't quite understand it. And I said, well, what is it? And she said, it's what my life used to be. I think it's the street view. What do you think? So I really wanted to talk about music because in a way, music transports you in the same way that you can be transported to the aerial view. The way we look at things, the way we sort of rationalize, the way we visualize, the way we sort of lose the anxiety and start maybe feeling less anxious. And I just wanted to throw that out today. I wanted to have a talk to you today about music.

Well, this is not what I thought we would be talking about. Enid said, have a friend named Enid, as Enid said, we talk in general about what each episode might be about, but she never tells me what questions she's going to ask me or what specifics will be. But this time she told me nothing. So if you gave me a list of 100 things I thought we talked about today, music wouldn't have been on it, but that's

I know.

Mm-mm. Yeah.

Was sex on it? Because I could talk about that too.

Well, that would get us a lot more listeners, I'll tell you that. So now you've distracted me. Music, you you might not know this, maybe I've told you, but music's been a big part of my life. In fact, up until about 20 years ago, and I'll explain why that time, maybe a little less, my single greatest possession in my life was a cassette tape.

Yes it would, I'm telling you.

See ya.

that I created when I was living abroad. And by that time I had written, I think about, I'm trying remember how many, maybe about a dozen songs on the guitar. Almost all with words, two of them were kind of musical, just instrumentals, but at least 10 of them had words. And I'd written them starting when I was in college. And in those days, obviously we didn't have the digital recording capabilities we have today and have had for a while. One day when I was living in Italy, the apartment I was living in had zero furniture, but marble everything. And the acoustics were fantastic. So one day I went into the bathroom, I took my little cassette recorder, I took a cassette tape, popped it in, and I started recording the songs that I had written because I was afraid I'd forget them, right? Because I didn't know how to write music at those points. I never would have gotten around to it. So I said, okay, if I put it on a cassette tape, okay, well, a cassette tape. Now I have all the songs I've written, which were my number one prized possession. So if somebody said, you get to keep one thing in your life, we're going to take everything else. And I was in my twenties at this point, or actually early twenties. I think I was maybe 20, 21, something like that. I said, okay, take everything, but leave me the cassette tape with my songs because it was my, it was my, they were my creation. They were my babies. And the sound in this bathroom was fantastic because it was all marble, the acoustics were terrific. So I give you that little anecdote to tell you that music's been important to me too. So I thought off and on about why is it that music has the effect that you've described? I'm not a neuroscientist. Yeah, I'm a doctor, but I'm not a neuroscientist. And I can't tell you the answer, except I will tell you something interesting. Somebody once asked me why, why do certain chords go together? So When you listen to pop music, anybody who's a musician out there knows this, and anybody who's not a musician, you might know it, that most pop songs have about four chords in them, and they're all the same song. They're all the same chords. G, C, D, they're all E minor. That's a common one. There are some very sophisticated songs out there, but most pop music that you listen to is a limited number of chords, and they sound great. The question is, well, why do they sound great?

So what is music? Music is sound. What is sound? Sound is frequency, right? So our brain, for some reason that I have no idea, maybe somebody will send us a note and tell us, but our brain likes certain frequency more than others. So, you know, when nails scratch along the blackboard and make that sound, I don't know anybody that likes that sound and would want an album of it. So that frequency is not desirable, it's not pleasant, but other frequencies, especially...

Yeah, yeah.

know, music, each chord has a number, as you know. So, you know, when you play, you know, it's the one chord, the two chord, the three chords, depending on what note you start on, some are major chords, some are minor chords. But there's a sequence that is particularly delightful for human beings. That's when the five chord goes back to the one chord. It's kind of like coming home. You've heard a million songs and this five one combination, for some reason, It just hits that sweet spot. So that's enough music theory today. But the point is we like certain frequencies over other frequencies. We like the five one. We don't like, you know, nails on a blackboard. And they do something to us. know, do they release endorphins? Probably they do. Maybe dopamine is released. I don't know which neurotransmitter is involved actually, but one of them is. And so they create this, this peace, this feeling of peace and tranquility that you describe. And so really, that's why people like music. One of the reasons, not the only reason, one of the reasons people like music so much, because you described it. It makes you feel great. It does something to our brain. So, you know, unless we're going to walk around with headphones on all day, which some people do now, or ear pods, or now, or air pods or whatever. You know, how do you, you know, how do you duplicate that feeling? And you have hit the nail on the head. The way to

Yes, they do actually,

maybe not duplicate it, but approach that feeling on a regular basis, which makes us more tranquil, brings us more peace, lowers our anxiety and our angst, is the aerial view. So I had a conversation just a couple of days ago with a very good friend of mine. He's actually a doctor. I always tell him he's the best doctor I know. Great doctor. Very good guy, great heart. Not only is he technically very good, but he cares immensely about his patients and will always do the right thing, which is why I think he's such a great doctor. And we were talking, having coffee, and at some point I mentioned something about the aerial view. And he said to me, yeah, I went to the aerial view. was in that 30,000 view position. And I went, no, no, that's not the aerial view. And I limited the fact that I called it the aerial view. I should have named it something else. Because the aerial view makes people think, oh, just get off the ground, hover on top, be like you're in an airplane or a space capsule and look down on Earth and you get a wider view. That's not the aerial view. It's not the wider view that we think about, the practical wider view. It's a wider view of why we're here, of how life works, of how the world works. And we've talked about it. And if you don't mind, I just want to talk about it for a couple of minutes. Enid (10:27.0) Sure.

It's how you get that feeling you get when you listen to wonderful, beautiful music. Now, of course, not all music does that to you. Some classical music does it. Obviously, there's some rock music and other R &B. Some other music clearly does that. Not all music does it. But anyway, getting back to this point, the reason I want to just spend a couple of minutes reviewing or talking about the aerial view again is so people understand what this means. So there are a couple of fundamentals we're just going to spend a couple of minutes on. One is time. You have to understand how time works. You have to understand that time, rather than the progression from past to future, like the timeline we're all familiar with from school, that's not how time works. It's much better to think of what we call the jukebox of time, which is each record in the jukebox represents a moment of time. And every moment of time is in that jukebox, past, present, and future. They all exist. Time. rather than a process is an entity. It's a thing. Now it doesn't seem that way. I understand that. And cause and effect do seem real. I understand that. But they're misleading. It's an illusion. And Einstein explained very clearly why he, and how and why he discovered that time is a thing. Past, present, and future is just being a stubborn illusion. That's the first thing. And the reason it's important is because you have to understand that all moments of time exist contemporaneously. and that we are alive in every moment of our lives perpetually. Every moment of our life is now. It's not the past. So right now we're talking. I just said a word. I said the word time. Boom. That's a moment. Now I'm on to something else. So when I said the word time, now you'd say, that's in the past. It's in the past relative to where we are, but it is still alive. I'm still saying that word a couple of seconds ago, but it still exists. Okay. That's the first thing to understand. That helps us understand why we never lose anybody, that the concept of death is very different than what we think. So yes, there is a finite moment. There's a last record of our life. From the day we're born to the day we die is called our lifespan. The last record, which is the same for everybody, not the same in terms of the manner of our death, but exactly what happens. We leave this earth. We're no longer on any of the records of the jukebox of time going forward, but we remain on all the ones that existed, not his memories.

but actively happening. Okay, so that's a very important concept to understand. The next concept you have to understand better is death. Death is the single greatest clue to why we're here. What happens at the moment of death? Everything we have, everything we knew, every relationship we experienced, every event of our life, mostly our wealth, our fame, our prestige, our accomplishments, they all go to zero. They're not there anymore. So what counts? So since longevity cannot be the point of life, because everything, all of us die and everything goes to zero, there must be another purpose of life. That's what the aerial view tells us. So what's that purpose? We talked earlier about how, I mean, earlier in this podcast about how we're dumb when we're young and smart when we're old, which is exactly backwards. Because young people do stupid things that could end their life. Jump into shallow bodies of water, drive too fast. skateboard without a helmet, all kinds of, you know, take drugs, all kinds of things that could prematurely end that life. And when we're older, we realize, those are silly things. I shouldn't have done those. So life is backwards. We should be smarter when we're young when it counts and dumber when we're old when it doesn't count. And it's exactly backwards. It's the opposite. We learn until the day we die. And you mentioned dementia. I'm not so sure people don't learn while they have dementia. I don't understand. I'm not sure what dementia really is, nor do I think anybody else does.

Right.

but I don't think we ever stop learning. So the point is that we start off stupid and we end up hopefully smarter. Everybody ends up smarter than they were, right? Everybody, even if you're not the most brilliant person in world, you are smarter near the end of your life than you were at any other point. So it points to the concept of life being preparation. Because the only way that makes sense is preparing for something else. Otherwise, our genetics, our evolution should have been... making us smarter when we're younger, that is survival of the fittest, Darwinism, which is real. In that case, we should have been smarter in the beginning. Most animals can run pretty quickly after they're born. We can't do a thing for years and years and years. So it's backwards. So that leads us to the conclusion that perhaps life is preparation, which is what I believe. Preparation for what? What comes next? I have no idea, but that's an important concept that life is preparation. So in order to prepare, we won't spend too much more time in this because we've reviewed it before, but really our purpose is this evolution from selfish to selfless, from inward focus to outward focus, so that we are maximally prepared for what comes next. Okay, that's what the aerial view is all about. It's not the 30,000 foot view getting some panoramic vista of the world and your environs and the events of the day. It's understanding what life is and what our purpose is. Because once you get that, then you realize, okay, I only really have to focus on one thing more than anything else. That is, how am I doing as a human being? I making the evolution? Am I going from selfish to selfless? Am I turning that camera around, that selfie camera from me to other people? Am I learning that the greatest joy in life comes from helping other people, which you ended know better than anybody. So that's what this is about. Now, let's tie this back to music. So music, as you said eloquently, gives us some peace, some tranquility, this warm and fuzzy feeling. Well, when you're in the aerial view, when things start to go awry, when things start to go bad, and you remember, you remember what life is about and why you're here, and especially when you help other people, you get that warm and fuzzy feeling, you get the same feeling. So that's how I think we can kind of tie these two concepts together.

I think they're very much tied together, which is why I really wanted to talk about that. think it's almost getting, it's a musical experience in a way to look at the world in a different way. I think, and it's interesting that you mentioned that maybe you shouldn't have called it the aerial view. And you and I have been talking and listening, we listened to that podcast from Dr. Ellen Langer and I'm reading her books. I'm sort of hooked on it. It's sort of interesting. She calls it mindfulness. Would you say, Mark, that The area of view is really a mindful process of looking at things.

Yes. So I've also read her works. We listened to that three hour podcast, whatever it was. It was long. I don't think it was three hours. It was long. Anyway, was it three hours? Yeah, that's right. Because I listened to it over a couple of days. And then I read her latest book. Yeah, she talks about very similar things to what we talk about here on our podcast. There's a lot of similarities. For instance, choice. She says,

I know.

No, it was. I think it was three hours. Yeah.

Yeah.

And you know that I completely concurred there. There's no such thing as a best or right choice. When you understand that, we've talked about that, we spent the whole episode on that a few weeks ago, that when you understand that there's no best and right choice, that is extremely liberating. You want to have peace and tranquility? Make a choice and let it go. How great is that? And the reason you do that is because there is no way to predict the outcome. She mentions that. That's actually what quantum physics tells us, but our lives also tell us the same thing. There is no way to predict the outcome of any choice or decision because it is being impacted by the billions of other choices and decisions made by everybody else. It's that bubble we talked about that you release and that's then whacked around by all those other bubbles. And so you can't know, it is impossible to know what any choice will yield. And that's very liberating. That creates tranquility, that brings peace, that removes anxiety, removes angst. This is extremely helpful. So yes, she calls it mindfulness, but we share a lot of the same ideas. she doesn't take it to the next level, which is the aerial view, which explains why this is important, which is fine. I mean, she's done fantastic work in her career and I have nothing but admiration for all she's done and continues to do. But it's a little different. The aerial view takes it to the quote, next level, I guess. But it does, right? It's a different perspective. She mentions actually perspective to give her total credit, but

Yeah.

But it's that other perspective. I'll tell you another story. You're going to laugh because you don't know this because this just happened two days ago. And I don't think I maybe I told you. So I was taking a bike rack off a bike and it was brand new. And I laid it down on the driveway and I wanted to fold it up and put it in the car. And I started to do that and I shouldn't have done it in the position I was and where it was, but I'm a stupid man, so we do stupid things. And I went to do it and it started to tip over and it's fairly heavy, right? So I went to grab it. did grab it. And what I should have done is let it go and said, it's just a thing, who cares? But it was 24 hours old and I didn't want to wreck it. So instead of letting it go, I held onto it so I could gently lay it down. And as I did that, because it's so heavy, it It yanked me and I lost my balance and I fell over it and around it. you know, had I been, and I'm pretty agile still. I can stand on one leg for two minutes if I have to, but at this point I was toast and I fell and I scraped up my hands. But what I noticed was one of my fingers looked funny and I realized immediately I had dislocated my finger. Right? So my first reaction, I looked at it I went,

Ouch.

My first reaction was, I know what this is because I've seen a thousand x-rays of it. I knew immediately, this is what it looks like because I remember I'm a radiologist. I go, this is what it looks like when it's actually covered by flesh because I've seen a million x-rays of it. I knew it and I was scraped up and still am a bit, but nothing terrible happened other than that. That was my first. My second thought was, okay, Now I have to, I can't do what I plan to do now. I have to go get this fixed. And the third thing I did was started to laugh. Why did I start to laugh? You know I do this sometimes because I'm thinking, okay, who knew that this is what was on page 344, right? But it just so happens, page 344 of Mark's life is when he ridiculously trips over a bike rack stupidly and dislocates his finger, right? So that's how I look at it. Cause remember,

All right,

All moments exist contemporaneously. Our story has been written. All the pages exist. So instead of freaking out, I just say, I'm now on this page. I should embrace it. It's a part of my life. I don't like it. It wasn't the most painful thing by far. I've had a million more painful things than that. Well, maybe not a million, but a lot. It hurt. But I knew, of course, I'm a doctor. I knew exactly what I had to do. And an hour later, I had it put back in place after some... and now it's wrapped up for a week, but that's fine. But the point is, didn't say, and I had plans that day, I had plans the next day with a bunch of friends that were doing something during the day and immediately knew all those are out the window, Page 327, whatever page, page 344, was not what I thought it was gonna be. It's written differently, but it's still a page of my story. It is no better or worse than a day of great joy. and fun. It's just the way it is. So the way to look at our lives, in my opinion, and I, you know, I don't like to be dogmatic, but I'm pretty certain this is right. And the reason I think it's right is because it's going to make you feel, everybody feel a lot better about their life is if you look at your life as a book and understand it that way. That's what the aerial view is, then every page is equal. A page of great joy and success is really no different than the day you dislocate your finger. They're all equal moments in time. No record in our jukebox of time is made of gold and the other ones are made of lead. They're all made the same. All moments in time are equivalent. We assign them. We imbue them with a different value. Good times, we raise up. Bad times, we lower down. But that's again an illusion of life, they are all equal. And when you look at life that way, then you appreciate all moments. And then guess what? You are performing Dr. Ellen Langer's mindfulness. That is what mindfulness really is. It's appreciating every moment of your life equally. They're all important. Not just the good ones, but the bad ones. Dislocating my finger, okay, not on that, wasn't on my dance card today, for that day, but it happened. Wow, how interesting. Page 344 included

dislocating my finger, scraping up my arms, going to see my friend, luckily, who was able to see me in orthopedist and put my finger back in place. And it wasn't what I thought it was going to be, but that's mindfulness. That's what she's talking about. Enjoy. Okay, go ahead.

But let me ask you this. What about the level of stress that one has when they fall, trip over the bike rack and dislocate the finger? You are in a better position, for example, than I would be, because you knew somebody to call immediately and to get the whole thing fixed. I couldn't do that. Most of our listeners couldn't either. So we have, when that happens to us, we are more stressed than you would have been. tell me why not?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'll tell you what. So what I did was I called my, remember I had hand surgery about a month ago. So I called this guy who is a great doctor. I figured I have a cell phone, so I'll just call him because all it did was change, it was valuable. It saved me three hours in the emergency room, but otherwise I would have gone to the emergency room, but it would have been the same thing. I would have gone to the emergency room, I would have sat there probably an hour or two, whatever it was, and they would have done the same thing and eventually I would have been healed.

Yes.

But what about the stress level had you been sitting in there? Yeah. Okay. markekleinmd (24:34.3) Okay, here's why you don't have stress. It's just, it's mindfulness. If Dr. Ellen Lange were here, I'm a little cautious about speaking for her, but I'm pretty sure she would agree that... When you go to the emergency room, sit around and look at everybody. You'll see interesting people. You'll see things going on. Appreciate, you know, some people will be sad. Some people might be crying. Some people might be in pain. Other people might be walking out relieved because they found that they really weren't as sick as they were. All these things will happen. This is mindfulness. This is, she would say, paying attention to what's happening. So, yes, I saved three hours because I was able to, maybe not even three hours, maybe a couple of hours, because I went directly to his office and he fit me in fine. Yet that's an advantage. out about it, but the same process would have occurred. I would have gone, they would have given me an anesthetic, numbed up my finger, snapped it back into place, wrapped it up, and I would have gone home. But none of it's fun. I'm not saying it's fun, but to be mindful, like she says, is to be in the aerial view to say, ah, this is page 344 of my story. It's no more important or less important. When somebody reads the story of your life one day, Enid, and they read about us growing up on Long Island, and they read about your

Sure.

college experience, they'll read about how you began in the Reagan administration and then how you then became involved in nonprofits and was CEO of Meals on Wheels and on and on on on on. They're not going to say, wow, page 82 is the most great, great, great page of her story. No, it's all your story. They're going to finish it and go, didn't she have an interesting life? Wasn't she a great person? They're not going to pick any page or any event and say, that's the most important one. And that's how time works and that's how life works. We imbue happy moments with more significance than negative moments. And that's a mistake. Two reasons it's a mistake. One, it's artificial. It's not true. But two is you're taking away from your life experience. If you ignore or try to push aside the bad moments, you're effectively shortening your life. You're cutting out pages of your story. It's all important. Every page of your story is important. Every page is equal. Every moment is equal. It's hard for people to believe that. And people who are listening, and some of my friends who are listening, they go, here he goes again. But I promise you this is true. And I say jokes with one of my friends when he gets to heaven, he's gonna look back and go, holy crap, he was right. And the reason I, it's not that I want to be right. I want you to feel great about your life. I want people to appreciate how valuable life is. How every moment, like Ellen, Dr. L. Langer says, if you're mindful, every moment has value. You'll appreciate every life. There's less stress. There's less angst. You know, what do you worry about? Dying? Okay, let's take care of that. You're going to die. Done. We're done with that. Are bad things going to happen? Sure. But they're all part of your story. Embrace them. Embrace every page of your book. Embrace dislocating your finger. Because now, three days later, you know, it's still bothering me. You know what the worst part? I can't play piano. That's the worst part.

you

I know, there it goes. So that brings us back to music. You see? I know. But you know, and it does bring me back to, and we'll wrap it up, but the whole issue of dementia. My friend now is living in the past. That's what she remembers. She doesn't remember what she had for dinner last night, but she remembers what we did 35 years ago. We had that discussion yesterday. And maybe the music helped bring that out. I'm not sure, but I do know this. I know that...

There you go. I love playing music.

I'm watching her on that long journey to goodbye land or whatever, or losing mindfulness, whatever. And in so doing, I'm thinking about time. I'm thinking about all the things you're trying to teach me here about does time matter? And it sure does. And her time, interestingly enough, stopped way back when. That's where she is now in her head. And she's happy. She's happy where she was.

You know, like I said, I don't understand dementia, neither do think anybody does, but I think it's a mistake. It's frustrating when people don't remember that. I have another friend who has short-term memory loss. And it's very frustrating, I think, when you don't remember what you had for breakfast, right? And you do remember what happened 30 years ago, because those memories are in different places. It doesn't mean you're not mindful or can't be mindful. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. You know, we may not remember it. So I'll you an example. So music, if we go back 150 years, not even, if we wanted to hear a Mozart concert, We had to wait for somebody for there to be a Mozart concert somewhere in our city. Right. And we'd go and we'd hear that song one time. Whatever it was, whichever one we liked. We couldn't go home and play it on the radio. There's no radio. Couldn't play it on a stereo. There was no stereo. There was no digital. There was no Spotify. You heard it once in your life. Right. Right. That's it. So you have that long ago memory. You can't do it every day. We're a little spoiled now, but

Yeah. Yeah.

Just because you can't remember, I don't think we should minimize what life is for people who have this type of memory loss, cognitive decrease. I'm not saying I want it, I don't wish it on anybody, but I'm not so sure that these people can, and like you said, she's happy, that you cannot still appreciate life even though you can't hold those moments, right? You can't listen to that Mozart song again. You only got to listen to it once. Doesn't mean you can't hold them temporarily and move on to the next one.

Right, which is why I wanted to have this conversation today about music. And so I'm gonna end, I usually end with reading something from your book, which is called Wisdom from the Areal View, the superpower that can change your life and this world. There is nothing in your book about music, but there is something in a chapter called Panorama on page 189. And I'll end with this. You say, we rise each morning with an agenda in mind, but often it goes awry. Man plans and God laughs, the saying goes. How did I get here? How did this happen? We ask when we take a moment to reflect on our journey. One unexpected step led to another, and soon we found ourselves in uncharted territory. It is only in retrospect that we appreciate how those unscripted moments have changed us and moved us along a previously hidden path. We would swear that something or someone was guiding our way and that all of it would not have happened randomly. That notion is universal. We share a deep sense that it has something to do with meaning. Thank you, Dr. Klein. This was Musical and Magical.

Next time you have to sing for us Enid.

I will sing. oops, look at that, we ran out of time. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thank you everybody for listening. We'll see you next time.

Peace.