Thunderball
Español
May 3, 2026
by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher
When my daughter was six-years old I presented her with the idea that adults don't remember much of their childhood. Then, for the next few weeks, as we were having one father-daughter experience or another, she would ask me, "Dad, when I grow up, do you think that I'll remember this?"
They say that the Inuit have 18 different words for "snow" and that the Greeks had five for "love." Of course, we do remember our childhoods, but it is a different kind of memory, distinct from the time-place coordinates of adult consciousness. We need another word for it.
From my childhood, I remember seeing the James Bond movie Thunderball, which, since it came out in 1965, would have made me seven. Actually, what I remember is the seven-year-old me stepping out onto the sidewalk, after the show, in front of the Webb Theater in Wethersfield, Connecticut (it was a cloudy day) and the world being transformed, subtly different, unlike anything I had noticed before; call it hormones, good story-telling, or the power of Hollywood's dream machine.
I still get swept away just so, regularly, with a frequency that is sometimes dizzying, not just by movies, but by life itself. I try on feelings the way some people try on clothes. Empathy, sympathy... you name it; I've got it. I take on other people's points of view, like someone flipping through television channels or short videos online. I am sentimental, overly sensitive, dissolving into tears, particularly at stories of rescue. I've been called arrogant, but I'm far too self-critical for arrogance. I take criticism, my own and that offered by other people, to heart. I start by buying into it. I try it on, see how it feels, and if it fits, I keep it.
Recently, my life has been strongly colored by a book that I am listening to, the tragic misadventures of a family in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. I enter into, take on, and am overcome by the futility of the characters' lives. And then, sometimes long after I've left off listening, I am very pleasantly surprised to suddenly wake up, as it were, into my own rather fulfilling existence.
James Hillman, the dean of the Zurich Jung school, wrote that inconsistency is one of the signs of wisdom. (But he might have changed his mind about that.) That is, the same wise person is able to change his mind, to feel differently about, to draw various conclusions from the same set of circumstances. Of course, indecision is also inconstant, and indecision is not wise; so, wisdom is only inconsistently the source of inconsistency. Still, when the Zen masters caution that personal identity is not consistent, I know, all too personally, what they mean.
President Andrew Jackson said of Noah Webster (the man who wrote the first American dictionary), "I have no respect for a man who only knows one way of spelling a word." Seeing things from multiple points of view is an asset... at least, up to a point.
I feel passionately and my mind is overactive, and I know that combination carries me away, but still I am carried away. Paraphrasing Mark Twain's quip about New England's weather; if I don't like my mood, usually I only have to wait a minute... or an hour... at most a half a day. If you wanted to be kind, you would call my temperament mercurial or artistic. I'm not crazy, but I've always felt a close affinity with those who are.
My long beard served me well among both kabbalistic rabbis and the mountain folk of Vermont. In the long term, a dear friend once observed, "David, you have the most marvelous way of reinventing yourself every few years." And, just recently, her observation has again proven correct, as I step out of the theater and the world looks different once more.
One fundamental change in this reinvention traces back to my recent digital catastrophe:
Referring to how much I publish, people regularly say to me, "I don't know how you do it." I've done it by working too hard, at a furious pace, for years. But even with a Herculean work ethic, for years I was always only barely keeping up with it all. Sleep-deprived, up several nights each week performing detailed mental labor until 1, 2 or 3am, I would each Sunday collapse into a 3-4 hour afternoon siesta. I used to wonder how I could manage without stress hormones. Five weeks ago, I found out.
First, my principal email failed, and then, that same day, my website disappeared. For the first week of this disaster there was absolutely nothing I could do about it but wait and trust my programmer. The second week, with the site largely back online, it was more trusting and waiting as the mechanisms that allow me to upload new content, to publish the website, were then only slowly restored.
I had no choice. Literally unable to work, I was forced to relax. I had to give up my perfectionism, to put my obsessive-compulsion in abeyance. And even during the second week when and while my mechanisms of publishing were slowly returning, I was forced to make do, to streamline my process and cut corners. Coinciding with this technically-imposed respite, low season rushed in; with far fewer events taking place, it leaves me with less to do.
But adult consciousness alone cannot explain the change. It was not just that I had more free time. It was something far more fundamental, a revision nothing short of miraculous; I had a new sense of time. And the good news is that now that I'm back in the digital saddle and publishing again, this new relaxed time still applies. I am getting my work done sooner and more easily, without the urgency that had been my daily companion for years. And with my extra time I am advancing new projects, and completing old ones that were set aside in the rush.
Another fundamental shift in perspective involved in my recent reinvention of self has to do with a new personal relationship that I am entering; a relationship that is challenging my old sense of love, as my new working reality challenged my old sense of time. As my new sense of time emerges from the fiery furnace of my digital meltdown, my new sense of love is a phoenix rising from the ashes of another destruction, an emotional catastrophe that I've suffered and inflicted. As my regular readers will already know, stormy seas took their toll, and although we're still bailing, I'm relieved to report that our boat is now upright and that the forecast is bright.
The message, as I see it, in love as with publishing, is the same; I have to slow down, relax, trust and not overwork. And I have to keep in mind that, despite its attractiveness, this is all new ground for me; and remember, as I confessed above, I am disoriented under even normal circumstances.
A chapter from the Tao Te Ching comes to mind:
