The Long Way Home

I wasn’t very old the first time my mother told me a parable that she was to repeat many times while I tried to grow up: “‘I complained about having no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

I never had more than two pairs of shoes in those days – one for church and funerals, and one for everyday wear. I don’t believe she said that just about a pair of shoes, but in hindsight and with the pas­sage of time, I think she used that to encourage me to cultivate grati­tude and perspective. Gratitude for what I had and the perspective to see that others had less than I did. She taught me empathy, and that has served me well.

I thought about this the other night when I was tossing and turn­ing in the dark, wrestling with my pillows. In recent years, I’ve been uncomfortable sleeping with every pillow I tried, and I’ve tried many.

I may blame my pillows for dis­rupting my sleep, but there may be many other causes, not least an ag­ing and infirm body that stiffens up if I don’t keep it moving. Lengthy hospital stays and too many nights in hotels and guest bedrooms showed me that good pillows, the kind that are soft enough to cradle my cranium yet firm enough to sup­port me through the night, are hard to come by.

In my search for a perfect pillow, I did a fair amount of online research. As usual, when you get into online stuff, you find out from reviews that everybody has a different opinion. The most helpful information was that several factors come into play when shopping for a pillow, includ­ing your sleep position, mattress firmness, and personal preferences. For me, price matters too. I’m skep­tical of anything over $40 or $50.

As a “side sleeper,” I’m supposed to need a firmer, thicker pillow to fill the space between my head and shoulder to keep my neck and spine in a neutral, straight alignment.

They say “back sleepers” need a medium to firm, flat pillow with enough support to cradle my neck’s natural curve without pushing my head too far forward.

Stomach sleeping, which I hav­en’t been able to do for more than a decade, requires a soft, thin pillow, or no pillow at all.

I once loved down-filled pillows, but they don’t offer firm enough support for side sleepers—memo­ry foam traps heat and thus sweat, and it’s hard to fall back to sleep on a wet pillow. Polyester fiberfill pillows, which are within my stin­gy price range, tend to flatten over time and clump up with use.

I’m hoping that someone out there has finally found a good pil­low that they will recommend.

Early this morning, while struggling to make the current pillow com­fortable, I heard my mom’s voice saying, “I complained about my pillows until I saw the homeless man who sleeps at night on a bench in the neighborhood bus shelter, who has neither a pillow nor a bed.”

Damn that empathy she cursed me with. Gratitude for a bed and four walls and perspective to see we’re doing it wrong.

How did that empathetic upbring­ing affect my political views? The rare times that party politics came up in our typical 1950s-era rambler in Richfield, my mom would say, “The Democrats are for people like us.”

I inferred that Republicans were for people like my Uncle Bob and Aunt Vona. Bob was a vice-pres­ident at Sentry Insurance in Ste­vens Point, WI. They lived in a big house, had a really cool boat, and were prominent activists in Wis­consin’s Republican party.

I admit that I envied Bob and Vo­na’s lifestyle. Their house had two stories, a bunch of bedrooms, a den, a big dining room, and cable tele­vision–we had none of that. While I strove to match the good parts of their life, I didn’t pay much atten­tion to politics.

In my late 30s, I dove headfirst into politics, both locally and na­tionally. Mom had said the DFL was for people like us, and moms always have more influence than they know. I hung my hat with the DFL.

Studies in political psychology generally indicate that Democrats tend to score higher on measures of empathy compared to Republicans.

Empathy is feeling what others feel, while compassion is feeling for others and being moved to help, but without taking on their emo­tional burden. The goal is to move to compassionate action, where you can help without sacrificing your own well-being.

In these turbulent times, I’ll leave you with this quote from the late US Senator John McCain: “It’s al­ways darkest just before it goes completely black.”