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Let me tell you the story of the last days of the Red Baron. It is now believed that what killed him was perseveration. It’s a brain condition that causes people to get stuck in a particular pattern of behavior.

On April 21, 1918, the Red Baron flew his red Fokker triplane straight into enemy airspace, allowing aircraft and ground fire to shred his plane to ribbons and kill him with a bullet to the chest.

“He had target fixation and a mental rigidity,” says clinical psychologist Daniel Orme. The Red Baron “flew into a shooting gallery, violating all kinds of rules of flying — rules from the manual that he himself wrote.”

Perseveration is a brain dysfunction that causes people to persist in a task — to carry on in a completely illogical way, even when the chosen strategy is doomed and could lead to death.

The Red Baron wasn’t born with this condition — in fact, for most of his career he was a careful fighter who achieved 80 kills, more than any other World War I pilot. But he suffered a traumatic brain injury in a dogfight nine months before his death, and researchers now believe that this caused his dysfunction to develop.

Today, the Air Force would have made him DNIF — Duties Not to Include Flying. But in 1918, his headaches, airsickness and fatigue were ignored. The Red Baron kept on flying, until that April day when he drove himself straight to his death.

Fixation isn’t necessarily bad– it can lead to persistence or it can lead to obsession. Persistence is, or can be, a good thing.

Thomas Edison had to try over 80 different combinations before he got a light bulb to work. That was persistence. Despite all his previous failures, there was a reasonable chance he could come across the solution in his lifetime.

When I was in college, I lived in a fraternity house for a few years. This meant that frequently I was trying to write a paper in my little room while a raging party was going on in the halls. I learned to concentrate amid the distractions. I developed the ability to focus single mindedly in order to get the job done. It was a useful skill to pick up. I used it throughout graduate school, and if I were reading in a noisy place.

But I developed the skill so well, that there were repercussions later on in my life. Sometimes, even now, people can start talking to me without getting my attention first, and I may not notice they are talking to me.

Being able to focus single mindedly is a good thing. Persistence is a good thing. Practice makes perfect. If it weren't for persistence, I would never have been able to quit smoking, lose 35 pounds, or reduce my fear of flying to the point where I got my pilot's license. Persistence is a good thing. But there is a line that gets crossed, and it’s not quite obsession but it can be a distraction.

One day physicist Albert Einstein was searching for a paper clip. With his assistant’s help, he finally located one, but it proved too bent to be used. While they were searching for a tool to fix the clip, they came across a large box of paper clips.

Einstein opened the box, took out a new paper clip and began to make a tool that would straighten the bent clip. His assistant asked why, since they’d found perfectly good paper clips, Einstein would bother with the defective one. “Once I am set on a goal,” Einstein replied, “it becomes difficult to deflect me.”

I have seen people get fixated on slot machines. I’ve never understood that– slot machines?

One night many years ago, I was at a casino. And I saw that black had come up three times in a row. So I bet on red. Up came black again. Figuring to recoup my gain, I doubled my bet and bet on red again. Again, black.

At about this time, a younger man and his girlfriend were watching, so he started betting on black. I bet again on red, 6 times in a row, black came up again. Each time I was doubling my bet. This happened twice more. The other guy was sticking with his $2 bet and winning each time.

He and his girlfriend were kind of eyeing me like some sort of perverse good luck charm, happy to be on the receiving end of some sort of cosmic karma that said I lost and he won.

By now, the bet was getting rather large. I determined it would be one more spin on the wheel, and I would take my losses, which would be substantial. As it happened, red finally showed up after 9 blacks in a row, but you know– it could have turned up black again, and again. I got fixated, I simply “knew” that red “had to” show up again.

AndI am reminded about what someone said about trading in the stock market. The stock market can be “wrong” about a stock far longer than your wallet can hold out. I think about those folks who owned Enron stock. When it went south from $50 a share down to $35 a share, some people felt, it “had” to go back up, so they held on.

They became fixated that the stock “had” to go up. And they held on all they way down to $3 a share and lost more than they thought they could bear.

And those stock certificates are now selling on Ebay for $12 each as a collector’s item. Selling 1 share at a time. Persistence is not always a good thing.

Writer Vladimir Nabokov visited a friend in Utah. Nabokov was a butterfly expert, and wandered the landscape looking to add to his collection of moths and butterflies. His friend wrote:

“Nabokov’s fiction has never been praised for its compassion; he was single-minded if nothing else. One evening at dusk he returned from his day’s excursion saying that during hot pursuit over Bear Gulch he had heard someone groaning most piteously down by the stream.

“‘Did you stop?’ asked Nabokov’s friend. ‘No, I had to get the butterfly.’ The next day the corpse of an aged prospector was discovered in what has been renamed, in Nabokov’s honor, Dead Man’s Gulch.”

When fixation leads us to ignore human suffering– particularly suffering we could do something about, it means we have slipped off our moral bearings and we are in danger.

George Orwell wrote about a wasp who was attempting to steal some of his breakfast:

[The wasp] was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. (Notes on the Way in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds.,The Collected Essays, Journalism and letters of George Orwell (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), II, 15).

When I first read that passage, I shuddered. Sometimes it is easy to see other people being fixated: it is less easy to see it in ourselves.

One day I was humming along to a song by the Police: Every Breath You Take. I heard that song for the first time many years ago, and I thought, yes, that's how it is when you are first fully in the crushing grip of attraction. The object of your desire becomes consuming. It's kind of cute.

But a woman friend said she hated that song. It sounded like it was penned by a stalker. Every breath you take, I'll be watching you...? Isn't that kind of a madness? Yes, it is.

The other person, your potential beloved, seems to be constantly weaving a spell– usually of course, without their even realizing it. But the spell is being woven, nonetheless. You don't feel in control. You feel dizzy, weak-kneed, starry-eyed. The feelings are all in you, but you think they are coming from the other person.

You think about this person constantly, you long to be in their presence. You realize it is a kind of madness but you have no desire or urge to pull yourself out of it. The world is black and white but the object of your affection, the object of your desire is in living color.

You would climb any mountain, swim across the deepest sea. You would sacrifice your future, give up the memory of your past, just to be in the present moment with the sole representative of the Divine. How wonderful and painful it all is– all at the same time. You are stuck, you are fixated. You may be in danger of being a lemming and not seeing the cliff ahead.

Of course, as we get older, we get wiser, so our rationalizations have to acquire a little more sophistication. Instead of thinking: “okay, it doesn’t look like she notices me at all, but I will make her fall in love with me!” Instead of that, it becomes something else.

It might be golf, real estate, TV. Or even the sport of Extreme Ironing. The sport of extreme ironing was born in 1997 when British mountaineer Phil (Steam) Shaw, uncertain whether to stay home and do his laundry or go climbing, simply did both. As a joke, he knocked off a few shirts at the summit, having toted his board and iron with him. Word (and photographs) of the stunt spread quickly and the “sport soon branched into several countries.

In 2003, South African Troye Wallett won extreme ironing’s so-called Rowenta Trophy ... for ironing an item while suspended over a 300-meter gorge.

This brings up what we UUs call a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning." I think we get the idea of "free" and we get the idea of "search for truth and meaning," but what does "responsible" have to do with it?

The limit to freedom is responsibility. "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." said Unitarian Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

How can we tell the difference between persistence & obsession?

For persistence we are willing to be questioned by others as to our motive, our intent, our chances for success, and we remain steadfast. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.

For obsession, we are unwilling to be questioned, unwilling to consider alternatives, and unwilling to be dissuaded from the single minded pursuit of what consumers our attention, even if this means the destruction of our self or others..

An obsession would be something along the lines of wanting reality to be different than it is, and being unwilling to concede that.

Perhaps one way to tell the difference between persistence and an obsession is to ask someone you trust.

Is my making partner at the firm by age 40 a good thing? I have two years to go. Well, let’s add it up: your wife has left you, your kids are calling someone else "dad" and your house is empty except for fast food wrappers. By the way, the inside scoop is you may never make partner, because you try too hard & scare people– so maybe this is an obsession, after all.

Not only is there fixation on the personal level, there is also fixation on the social level. You may remember a few years back, there was a big scare about the SARS virus. It first appeared 4 years ago, and at the time, lots of people thought it would wipe out a significant percentage of the world’s population. Now it is rarely found outside of a test tube.

Some people are pretty concerned now about Bird flu. Like SARs, It has been spreading from Asia across the world. France now requires that all domestic fowl be housed indoors to prevent exposure to infected migratory birds. Yet, the virus has hit a French chicken farm anyway.

Some people in Germany are saying that the disease will spread in Africa and eventually mutate into a form that can infect humans. Europe had better start preparing now "for the direst of emergencies."

Such hysteria helps nobody, said Nicholas Barré in the French magazine, Figaro. The virus hasn't killed more than a handful of European birds, but the panic over it is threatening to kill the poultry industry. You can't get a bird flu by eating a bird, even an infected one, yet consumption of chicken has already plummeted to 50% across much of Europe.

In Italy, "where confidence in the public health system is low," poultry sales have fallen by an amazing 70%. Some people point out that the bird flu has been widespread for years in Asia, "where millions of people live in close contact with birds," but it has not mutated to a form that can harm humans.

Experts have gone on TV to explain that song birds and pigeons, the only birds most Europeans ever even see, can't carry the virus. French politicians are ordering chicken every time they dine out. But it doesn't seem to help much.

According to the Harvard school of public health, if bird flu reaches United States 46% of Americans say they would stop eating chicken. 75% say they would reduce or avoid travel, and 71% would not attend public events. The Week, 3/10/2006.

An obsession or even an ordinary fixation can make us lose sight of the big picture.

A couple of years ago, I came across the story of the Diak people of Borneo, who in the 1950s, were suffering from a severe malaria epidemic. The World Health Organization came to the rescue, and sprayed DDT to kill the mosquitoes. It worked, for a time.

But then the roofs of the Diaks' houses started collapsing, and rats overran the villages. It turns out that the DDT had wiped out parasitic wasps that ate thatch-eating caterpillars. With no wasps around, the caterpillars proliferated and ate into the roofs.

In the meantime, bugs poisoned by DDT were eaten by lizards, which, in turn, were eaten by village cats. The cats died, the rats flourished, and deadly plague began to spread to the Diaks. The WHO was forced to parachute 14,000 live cats into decatted Borneo (CN Palmer's preface to Robert L. DiSilvestro's Audubon Perspective: Fight for Survival (New York: Wiley, 1990), xiii).

Can you imagine the people who had to think all this through? The poor scientists responsible for making a bad situation worse?

“Uh, honey, I’m gonna take Puss N Boots to the vet.” But she went last week!

“Yeah, well, we’ll talk later. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Just put this little parachute on. We’re going for a ride (meow). And out the door you go! (Meow!).

14,000 cats in parachutes. Yes, truth is stranger than fiction.

Sometimes our fixation is persistence, and it leads to new discoveries, new life. Other times our fixation is merely a distraction from what would be harder but ultimately more satisfying.

The Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, put it like this: Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

Sometimes the solution to being fixated or overly persistent is to give up for a while, let something percolate. A muscle works better if you don’t try and keep it constantly in use. Stretch, then relax, stretch, then relax.

A new study has found that thinking too hard and too long, in fact leads to decisions you later regret.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands asked 80 people to think over major life choices, such as the purchase of a house or car, or a move to a faraway town. Half of the participants were then given a series of puzzles and brain teasers to distract them before they gave an answer. With little time to agonize, these people made snap decisions – and ended up being more satisfied in the end.

People who deliberated carefully – delving deeply into the data in drawing up lists of pros and cons – ended up unhappy with their choices. The results indicate that complex problems are better sorted out in our unconscious minds, which have an instinctive wisdom in weighing multiple factors. Said one researcher, "At some point in our evolution, we started to make our decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things." The Week, 3/10/2006.

This is more difficult than it sounds I think because there is a fine line between letting something percolate in the background and complete abdication. But the right amount of persistence followed by acceptance: stretch & release, can work wonders.

Persistence can overcome bad luck, bad education, and mis-managed talent. But persistence isn’t everything. It is better to use a hammer than your forehead to drive a nail into the wall.

If we’re concerned our persistence has turned to obsession, the best thing to do is to check it out with people we trust.

Let us rise and sing, shall we? This is My Song, #159.