Author Archives: Sherri

Ritual

My last essay was about Community.  I wrote about how hard it is to feel truly connected these days, a little way I’ve found to better connect with my local community, and how important community engagement is to a healthy society.  I’ve had a series of interactions over the last three weeks that have inspired me to talk about a related topic:  the importance of ritual in building community.  It’s been an interesting journey.

The Friday after I last wrote, our neighbors had a little gathering to celebrate the return of their Tiki Hut.  I could write a whole essay on this Tiki Hut and the oasis they’ve built in their backyard.  It’s been a community gathering place since long before I arrived on the scene.  When we had a tornado come through last September, a falling tree took out the Tiki Hut.  We all mourned and dedicated ourselves to a rebuild.  We had something of an old-fashioned Amish barn raising earlier in the summer when we all came together to get the tin roof back up on poles.  The rechristening of the Tiki Hut happened on that recent Friday night.  Trish and I honestly weren’t planning on staying long.  The mother of a dear friend had passed earlier in the week and, while not unexpected, was still emotionally difficult.  We didn’t even bring over beer or wine for us to drink—just a bottle of water and a plan to pay our respects.  But there was something about being all together again and back in that Tiki Hut.  First, we went home and brought over a couple of beers.  Then we went out to get a pizza to add to the mix of food.  When the big speaker came out to start the sing-along, Trish left but I just needed to stay!  For the next couple of hours (and a few more beers), I sat crunched together in that little hut, shoulder to shoulder with my neighbors, singing classic rock tunes at the top of our lungs.  It just felt good to let loose, feel safe, and enjoy the company of my neighbors.  This was a ritual that these neighbors had shared regularly over the years, through the raising of children and all manner of daily life issues.  While in many ways we have similar backgrounds, we are far from a homogeneous group.  But we truly enjoy each other’s company and choose to focus on the things that make it fun and not the differences that might cause friction.  It was a dose of community that I sorely needed—even if I was singing loudly off key and probably a beat or two off.

The following week brought the funeral of our friend’s mother.  It was a Catholic Mass and, as a Jew, I found myself in the role of observer.  The wealth of ritual was overwhelming.  I felt how all that ritual was critical to establishing the connection to community upon which all places of worship depend.  The music and singing reverberated throughout the church in a way that only seems to happen in religious services.  The Catholics fell comfortably into the call-and-response of the service in the same way that I fall into the rhythms of the service in a synagogue.  It connects you to those around you.  You share in the familiarity of the process as well as the words and prayers.  I reflected upon how a funeral service, while meant to honor the person who has passed, is really for those who are still alive.  This ritual of honoring the dead, of burial and prayer, of respect for the human being who is no longer among us—it’s all about cementing community.  Juxtaposed with the solemnity of the day was, honestly, the joy of reconnection of people who hadn’t seen each other in a while.  While we all knew why we were there, we were also happy to be together.  There were hugs and smiles and whispered conversations as people caught up with each other.  As we moved through the luncheon after the burial and then the “after party”, the tone continued to lighten.  I’ve seen this many times before.  We tell funny stories about the person we lost, reminisce generally about time together, remember why we are connected, and usually promise to not let so much time pass again.  The ritual of a funeral builds and reinforces community.

I’d also happened to have read an article during the week by an author who was lamenting the loss of what he defined as Traditional Conservatism.  He quoted liberally from Edmund Burke, often described as the founder of American Conservatism, who talked about the importance of local action vs. federal action (I’m way oversimplifying).  What struck me was the theme about how the local community can better tailor “solutions” to the needs of the local population.  I don’t disagree.  Problems manifest differently in different communities and most cannot be effectively addressed with a large, national, “one size fits all” approach.  This, of course, is the basis for a State’s Rights approach to governance.  For this to work well, though, we need a strongly connected community that feels the obligation to look out for all of its members.  The difficult part, of course, is the “all its members” piece.  Ritual drives behavioral expectations in a community and I don’t think we generally have community rituals that sufficiently value outreach and inclusion to everyone. This is not meant to be a knock on Conservatism—that thinking around local action and personal accountability really resonates with me.  It’s simply my observation that our communities don’t seem to be strongly connected enough that everyone’s needs are getting reasonably addressed.  We can’t fix it all with ritual sing-alongs in Tiki Huts, but maybe the creation of new rituals that bring disparate people together is a part of the solution.

Regardless of the deep societal implications, let me just say that I really like ritual.  I find it very comforting.  Maybe this is a part of getting older, although I have never liked constant change.  I like my morning rituals.  I like our rituals as a couple.  I like the rituals we are building with friends.  Rituals do indeed change, which can be good and bad.  When we were helping our friend clear out her Mom’s house last week, we were discussing how no one wants sets of china anymore.  For most people, the rituals around family gatherings have really changed.  They used to be very formal—hence the sets of china and silver (real, tarnishing silver) and formal dining rooms.  My family used to do that for Thanksgiving and the key Jewish Holidays.  Those rituals cemented our family structure.  I miss that.  But Trish and I are building new rituals as well—time together at friends’ lake houses, Christmas morning with our step-grandkids.  There will be more, I’m sure.  Treasure those rituals in your life and the community connection they bring.  And if you don’t have any?  Create some.  We don’t get to sustain healthy communities without them.

Buy Nothing

As Trish and I prepare for our home renovation, due to start this fall, we are doing a bit of purging.  I find it interesting that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more and more minimalist.  It seems to have coincided somewhat with combining households with Trish and with retirement.  In retirement planning, advisors often talk about the three stages you move through financially:  the accumulation years, the disbursement years, and bequest.  “Accumulation” years are your working years, during which you build wealth; “disbursement” years are when you’ve retired and start living off of those investments; “bequest” is when you die and what’s left goes to people and places determined by your will. 

As Trish and I have made that transition from “accumulation” to “disbursement” financially, we seem to have also made a transition from “accumulation” to “disbursement” with material things.  Even though we both have always been more “experience” oriented than “thing” oriented, over 60 years you still accumulate a lot of things.  We’ve decided we want to trim that down now and not leave that to our heirs or, well, whomever might get stuck with cleaning out our final dwelling.  Besides, we just don’t like clutter.  The negotiation comes in when one person’s clutter is another’s prized possessions.  But I digress.

Coinciding with this drive towards simplification is my increasing awareness of the waste I generate and my desire to not send any more to landfills than absolutely necessary.  I pride myself on a weekly garbage can with as little in it as possible.  (Well, unless Trish has been on one of her “trash picking” walks, in which case our full trash can is a public service.)  So, as we purge in preparation for this renovation, we’ve talked a lot about wanting to “rehome” items as much as possible.  Enter the Facebook Buy Nothing groups.

My bestie turned me onto these treasures.  They are hyperlocal groups on Facebook in which you post things you want to give away and/or things you are looking to get.  Everything must be free.  If you want to sell things, there are many other outlets.  This is a site for rehoming things to avoid the trash can.  The area covered is small (maybe five square miles) and you must apply via your address to join.  Wanted items are picked up at the person’s home unless otherwise arranged.  I started using our local Buy Nothing group as I purge and I’ve found an unexpected benefit:  a much stronger sense of community.

Here’s an example.  Over the years, I’ve been a big fan of The Teaching Company.  They sell courses on a huge range of topics.  It started on cassette tapes, moved to CD’s, then DVD’s, and now mostly streaming (although you can still buy DVD’s).  I’d bought several courses over the years, from Understanding Probability to A Tour of the Louvre to The History of the Civil War.  Although I will admit to not having watched every single episode, one long Customer Service call later I was able to secure streaming access to most of the courses I bought.  So, the DVD’s, etc., were really no longer required.  I could have done several things with that pile.  I could have just trashed them.  Big no.  I could have donated them.  But I chose to post them on our Buy Nothing group.  In short order, someone commented that they’d be interested in the whole lot.  I PM’d my address, left the bag of DVD’s outside the front door, and he came and picked them up.  We never even met!  But here’s the thing:  I know that there is some household nearby that is currently enjoying those courses.  And in some small way, maybe because we know each other’s names and he came to my house, we are connected. 

Sometimes it can be more personal.  A different post offered a number of books related to Judaism as Trish and decided to trim our collection.  One local woman came and took them all.  As I was helping her get the boxes to her car, she told me she was so excited to give the flash cards from Trish’s Hebrew lessons to her granddaughter.  That makes the connection even more profound.  Through this little Facebook group, I’ve accessed more of my local community and that makes me feel more connected. 

Community in this country is often built around families, places of worship, and hobbies.  I did not have any children of my own, so I missed out on creating community through interaction with my kid’s friends’ families—probably the largest foundation of community.  When I was affiliated with a synagogue in the Lehigh Valley, I built a very strong sense of community but it rarely moved off the synagogue grounds.  And since my fondest hobbies are reading and writing—both solitary doings—I don’t really get much community through my spare time activities.  I’ve felt that lack of community my entire adult life.  Don’t get me wrong:  I am blessed with a strong group of friends, a great neighborhood where we know and talk with each other, and strong ties within my family and in-laws.  I have just been missing that broader connection to my capital “C” Community like I had when I was growing up.  I’ve been missing that feeling that makes “home” feel like home.

I don’t think I’m alone.  Even before the pandemic, studies have shown that most people didn’t even know the names of their neighbors and had limited connections into their local communities.  The pandemic, of course, has just exacerbated that.  When you don’t feel a connection to your community, you don’t care as much about what happens to others around you.  When you don’t interact with people in your community as whole humans you just see them as different classes of mono-dimensional people—people who drive too slowly or too fast; people who share or don’t share my political views; people who dress similarly as, or differently from, me.  And when we divide the world into two groups of people—those you align with and those you don’t—then we all ended up feeling both alone and threatened at the same time.  That’s just not good!  Healthy communities only happen when people come together.

We all need more community.  Making that happen takes effort and it’s an effort that I’ve honestly not been very good at over the years.  I’m sure that’s contributed to this sense of isolation that I’ve often felt.  Now that I don’t have my “work” community, yet have more time on my hands, I felt I should be making more of an effort to get engaged with those around me.  Old habits die hard, though, and I haven’t made much progress.  However, I can’t believe how much joy I have gotten out of participating in this Buy Nothing group!  The thought of knowing that little pieces of me are now in multiple homes in the area somehow makes me feel more a part my “new” hometown (that I’ve now lived in for six years!).  It’s a start.

The Importance of the Derivative

I remember fellow students, in high school, complaining about having to learn algebra.  “When am I ever going to use this?”  The teacher would come up with some lame example about dividing pizzas or something like that, but people were rarely convinced.  Well, I am going to do you one better:  I’m going to talk about the importance of calculus in your daily life—specifically, the concept of the derivative.  I promise that there will not be a quiz at the end.

A derivative, in calculus, represents the slope of a line tangent to a curve at a particular point.  The steeper the curve, the larger the derivative.  I real life, this means that the derivative represents an instantaneous rate of change.  Why should you care?  My thesis, today, is that we are more sensitive to a rate of change than we are to the change itself.  I find that weirdly fascinating, yet also helpful.

Take gas prices, for instance.  Gas prices dropped dramatically during the early days of the pandemic.  Most of us noticed (and were pleased) but since we weren’t driving much, we didn’t much care.  And we rarely gave much thought to a change that impacted us in a positive way, except to think “Cool” when we filled our tank for $20.  As our world started to open back up and we started driving more, prices started to creep up.  Supply and demand started to match up and prices recovered to where they were before the pandemic.  There was grumbling, since even though logic tells you that those pandemic prices wouldn’t last, we very quickly got used to those lower prices.  Then Russia invaded Ukraine and the global price of a barrel of oil shot up on fears of short supply.  (I know this is an over simplification, but I don’t think you want me diving into the details of global supply, reduction in refining capacity, and how pricing on commodities works.)  What we saw was the price of a gallon of gas rising at an extremely rapid rate.  The derivative was super large.  Now, I don’t want to minimize the impact of going from $3/gal gas to $5/gal gas on people with very limited flexibility in managing unexpected costs.  However.  For most of us, the increase in cost to fill our tanks hasn’t really changed our driving habits.  There are still plenty of people out driving around at 80 mph, heading to the Poconos or the Jersey Shore.  Maybe people have cut back in spending elsewhere, but that hasn’t really shown up in consumer spending data.  But there sure is a lot of complaining about the price of gas, because the price went up so quickly.

This concept of the importance of the derivative, of managing the rate of a change, is critical in understanding how to create any change that will last, be it in your workplace, society at large, or even within yourself.  Push too much change on people too fast and there will be swift and harsh resistance.  Meter change out at a slower rate, a smaller derivative, and the chance that the change will be accepted and internalized is much greater.  I’ll start with a scary negative example.  Hitler did not create Nazi Germany over night.  It took over a decade of careful meting out of small changes that built on each other over time.  This did not happen by accident.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  He started by recognizing how beat down the German people were after WWI and, taking advantage of the need to build national pride again, gave people little steps to take to reestablish their sense of self and empowerment.  Had he tried to go directly to “Kill all the Jews and conquer Europe!” he would have been met with swift resistance.  The derivative would have been too large.  He kept the slope on that rate of change low.

This concept can also be used in a more positive way!  I believe in the MLK Jr. statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Many of us may be impatient to see greater social change—especially those of us who live with negative impacts daily.  I’m well aware that progress often happens in a “two steps forward, one step backwards” progression, but progress does happen.  It has to happen at a rate that can be absorb by the larger society.  In the mid-90’s, during my years at the bench developing products for use in industrial paints, I had the chance to meet the guy from the EPA who led the efforts to reduce solvent content in these paints.  It was at a summer Gordon Conference, which were very informal get togethers on the campuses of sweltering New Hampshire prep schools without air conditioning.  There would be a topic (in this case Industrial Paints and Coatings) and people from all walks of life—government, universities, industrial companies—would get together to share the latest scientific research on the topic and play really pathetic games of basketball.  One night session, I was sitting up in the back row of the seminar room where there was a nice cross breeze from open doors.  I ended up sitting next to Jim and we started talking about the state of the industry.  He was feeling down because we were at a point in time when industry members were pushing back hard on the latest round of EPA goals for solvent content, giving him all sorts of grief about how unnecessary they felt the next stage of regulations was and how the performance of paints was going down and costs were going up from more expensive ingredients, yadda yadda yadda.  He began talking as though his entire career was worthless.  I reminded him about where we were back in 1970 when the Clean Air Act first came out and these regulations started to be created.  “Jim, look how far we’ve come!  And, more importantly, WE ARE NOT GOING BACK THERE!  The bar of minimum acceptance has moved permanently higher.”  I really do not think people would want to go back to the paints with these high levels of solvent and the carcinogenic compounds in them.  Even though industry fought him every step along the way, those regulations spurred innovations that have given us products that are, for the most part, better and definitely safer.  The changes and developments happened over decades.  And that combination of performance and safety is now what we’ve come to expect.  It’s been normalized.

Human beings seem to be naturally resistant to change.  I’m sure that is for some evolutionary reason.  The difference between people today seems to be that we have differing levels of comfort with rates of change.  While I hypothesize that this may be a fundamental difference between Progressives and Conservatives, it is also a function of who is affected by the change at hand and how.  If the change makes your life better, you’ll want it right now.  If you perceive you’ll be unaffected or disaffected, you’ll resist.  I have this annoying tendency to say “No” to almost everything when a change is thrown at me.  Trish has learned to plant an idea, let it marinate, and then come back and prod a little bit.  When I’m cranky about something, though, it’s amazing how quickly I will agitate for change.  The more unhappy a person is with the status quo, the more they will want change to happen and to happen quickly.  Waiting for someone to “get comfortable” with putting out a fire, when you are burning and they are not, is really frustrating.  And when enough people are burning, well, that’s when bloody revolution tends to happen.

Most change, though, doesn’t have to involve such dramatic urgency.  I want to leave you with that thought of the derivative—understanding that someone who seems resistant might be reacting to the rate of change more than the change itself.  Give people time, but keep nudging.  Don’t let them off the hook in accepting the status quo.  Remember, also, when YOU are resisting that you might be responding more to the derivative.  Challenge yourself on that.  We are resilient creatures, us humans.  We can get accustomed to a lot of things.  Is that good or bad?  Well, that was in the other essay.

The Horror of a Blank Sheet of Paper

When I first started this blog almost three and a half years ago, I had a lot of pent-up energy around thoughts that I really wanted to express.  Many of those early essays came from coaching lessons that I’ve given over the years and/or real hot button topics for me.  Now that those urgent thoughts have been shared, I’ve settled into a pattern where my writing is driven in large measure by what’s currently going on in my life. Those daily observations always connect back to “deeper thoughts”, so I get to fulfill my desire to share those ruminations in the context of what I’m experiencing today. 

What is sure to dominate my writing for months to come is the major renovation work Trish and I are undertaking on our home.  We love this house.  Trish has lived here for almost 30 years.  It’s a modest house in a fabulous neighborhood, conveniently located, and with great neighbors.  Trish has watched all their kids grow up.  I have been slotted into the crowd.  No one seems to be leaving.  We toyed with moving into one of the new 55-and-older communities popping up but decided instead to invest in this house and stay put.  I’m getting the kitchen of my dreams.  We are getting the second full bath that Trish always wanted as well as the master suite that she didn’t know she wanted until I told her she did. It’s a big project and neither one of us has undertaken anything like it in the past.

Originally, the title of this essay was going to be “Decisions, Decisions, Decisions” because that is what is going on right now:  a thousand decisions, big and small.  Fortunately, we’ve worked out a system that is helping this process go fairly smoothly.  I’m a Big Picture kind of gal and have focused on the layout of the kitchen and the choice of appliances.  I also am very comfortable with a wide range of decorating styles, as long as whatever is done is in good taste and put together well.  Trish has a genetic eye for design and, while not someone to lose herself for days in a tile shop, doesn’t get paralyzed by choice like I do.  We have agreed that she’ll take that first cut at design choices, aided by her brother who has an absolutely amazing eye for design and experience building from scratch, and I will provide any needed input at the end.  This means I’ll provide a tie-break vote if needed and generally agree with her choices because they are fabulous.  And they are!  I am so thrilled with how this is coming together!

I am enormously grateful for how this process is playing out because, as noted above, I get paralyzed by choice.  Give me two or three choices and I can make a decision.  And I will come to that decision quickly.  Give me a blank sheet of paper and say, “Design a kitchen, soup to nuts” and I will get nauseous.  This got me thinking back to a tool I used in my working days called the CARE profile.  Well, it was called the CARE profile back in the day.  Now it’s called the Team Dimensions Profile and is offered by a company called Training Solutions.  Find out more about it here.  I’m not shilling for the company and, in fact, may get sued for talking about it without permission but it has real merit.  The tool is used to help leaders put together balanced teams.  Understanding where you are in this CARE profile, though, is pretty useful regardless.

The basic concept is that we can’t all be good at everything from ideation through to completion of a project.  Everyone has different strengths.  The key is to understand your own strong points and then surround yourself with people who have abilities where you do not.  The acronym, CARE, stands for: Creator (generating the idea); Advancer (building on an idea to increase the possibilities); Refiner (winnowing down the choices); and, Executor (working out the details and implementing). 

I am a combination of Advancer and Refiner.  I have the occasional brilliant creative idea, but more likely that vision is a synthesis of other things I’ve seen that I put together in a new way.  Our kitchen design came out of tours of our neighbors’ houses, seeing what they had done and picking out what would work best for us.  Our final design is actually a tweak on one neighbor’s kitchen that we really like.  And while I’m pretty good at building on someone else’s ideas, or encouraging others to do such, I am best at narrowing down the choices by working through how something would function in real life.  Executing?  Yeah, best leave that to someone else.  Not a detail person, here, and too much of a perfectionist.

At one point in my career, we moved a number of our labs into a new building.  Labs are complicated beasts, yet the ability to plan the layout is a rare opportunity to really improve workflow.  We had a team in one of the labs who always worked well together and this move was no different.  One, a highly creative scientist, took a blank sheet of paper and produced a very clever layout.  The other, a detailed execution-focused scientist, made it practical and do-able.  We needed both.

Even choosing the appliances nearly did me in.  Wow, are there a LOT of choices!  I searched on line.  I asked friends for their thoughts.  I was afraid that I wouldn’t make the BEST choice and I’d have to suffer with the result.  Finally, I sat down and did two things.  First, I made my list of “threshold” requirements.  Any appliance in a given category that met those requirements would be good enough.  I didn’t need “perfect”.  Second, I chose two brands (GE and Bosch) that got high marks from my trusty Consumer Reports across the board.  We went to our local appliance retailer, list of threshold requirements in hand, and toured around.  I took his suggestions and dug into the websites to look at cousins of his picks to make the final choices.  Then I slept for a week.  Meanwhile, Trish and John were touring through granite shops, tile shops, faucet web sites, you name it.  I simply could not have done it.  The results, however, are amazing. 

For some reason, all of us tend to think that we need to be able to do everything equally well and we beat ourselves up if we fall short in even one area.  That’s just nonsense!  If we look honestly at those around us, we’ll notice that no one is truly strong in every part of that CARE profile.  I’m an Advancer/Refiner and proud of it!  Be proud of what you are, too.  And look to surround yourself with people having strengths in other areas.

Toxic People

The summer season is upon us, now, in the Northeast.  That means trips up to Poconos on a more regular basis and that means hours in the car to talk.  I am amazed at how much Trish and I always seem to find to talk about.  It’s not like we never have time to talk.  We are almost always together.  But get us in the car and amazing conversations ensue.  This, of course, is one of the reasons I love her.  But I digress.  A recent trip up to Lake Wallenpaupack gave us one of those “let’s see what comes up” conversation moments and we had a really interesting discussion around toxic people.  So, more than usual, Trish is my co-author on this essay.  Celebrate or blame her, equally.

Now, before we go any further, hear this, Dear Reader:  YOU ARE NOT IN THIS ESSAY IN ANY WAY!  It is natural to see yourself in things you read but I want all my friends and family to know that we have gone to GREAT PAINS to not use anyone we know as an example in this essay.  Just STOP IT.  You are not in here!  If anyone is used as an example in this essay, it’s me.  And we’ll get to that in a moment. If you happen to see something of yourself in this essay—since reading and thinking are a good way to hold up the mirror—then take this to heart:  truly toxic people rarely see themselves as toxic.

It would seem simple enough to begin by defining what I mean as “toxic person,” but that has turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of this discussion.  In general, Trish and I have defined a “toxic person” as someone who sucks the air out the room.  Not helpful?  A toxic person is someone who drains your energy.  Also not helpful?  A toxic person is someone who, when you see their name on caller ID, inspires you to groan and debate whether or not to pick up the phone.  I think you see where I’m going here.  It’s like the definition of porn:  you know it when you see it, but it’s hard to give a precise definition.

I will use myself as an example.  I look back to when I was in college.  I was a hormonal teenager, away from home for the first time, struggling mightily with understanding and coming to grips with my sexuality.  I knew I was gay.  I’d known since I was, what, 5 years old?  But in the 60’s, ‘70s, and even the ‘80s when I was in college, this was not a good thing.  Our culture taught me that what I felt was wrong and evil and must be purged.  I hated and feared this side of me.  I did my best to try and change it (fortunately, unsuccessfully).  I embodied angst and moodiness and unpredictability and I cried a lot.  A LOT.  I send a deep bow of gratitude to my dearest college friends who stuck by me through all of this.  I cringe, now, thinking about how toxic I must have been.  And the worst part of it was that I never (rarely?) explained WHY I was struggling so much since my deepest fear was coming out!  Thank goodness they did not abandon me or purge me from their lives.

I say that because I have gotten to a point where I have slowly purged toxic people from my own life as a self-protection mechanism.  This is not uncommon and there is much popular literature on the need to do so.  Toxic people drain your energy.  They bring you down.  You run the risk of spiraling right alongside them.  Let them go, the common wisdom says!  But.  But where is that line between self-preservation and selfishness?  When do you cross over from compassion for others to compassion for yourself?  This is where I hold up Trish and her family as models.  She and her siblings are some of the most compassionate people I know.  (This is the part of the essay she did not co-write and I’m guessing there will be battles during the editing process to see what remains in the final post.)  Each one of the four siblings has this amazing ability to talk with anyone, anywhere, anytime and make them feel like they are the most important person in the room.  I know it comes from their parents.  I never met their father, but the stories they tell (and, wow, can this family tell stories!) demonstrate his compassion.  And I had the extraordinary fortune to know their mother well, so I know for sure her influence.  There are people in this family’s orbit whom many would consider toxic, yet they continue to keep them close without falling into the spiral.  I think they are able to do this because they come from a place of love.  When you come from a place of love, there is always love to share.

There need to be limits to this compassion, and this is what Trish and I talked a lot about on the car ride.  We both get fed up when someone’s toxicity is somewhat self-imposed—by choices they have made, by lack of personal accountability, by lack of personal awareness.  Somewhat tied to this is the time arc of toxicity.  Is this person going through a defined tough time or does this toxicity just seem to be a component of who they are?  Let’s be honest, we all know people who seem to thrive on negativity.  And we all know people who thrive on trying to “fix” people in chaos, so they don’t see it as toxic. 

I still don’t have a good answer to my basic question of when I am smartly distancing myself from someone who is toxic and when I am being selfish and lacking in compassion.  I thought writing this essay would help me work that out, but it has taken me to totally different places than I thought it would.  There are no hard and fast rules, here, as with most of life.  Sometimes I have greater capacity for compassion than at other times.  Sometimes, I fear getting involved.  I can fear that toxicity may be contagious.  I guess where I need to leave things is with this thought:  Life is a series of choices.  Choose love and compassion as often as you can, and remember when others choose compassion for you.

Stretch and Balance

My regular readers will be very happy to know that I continue to keep my lack of motivation, discussed last time, at bay.  I even made it to a spin class this week at the Y and have the sore legs to prove it.  Today, Trish and I got up and out early to make the 8:00 Stretch and Balance class.  Nothing could be less intimidating than this class.  It is an hour of long stretches, a bit of core work, and a bit of balance work.  Consider it pre-yoga.  And, yes, it is focused on those of us of a certain age who might consider real yoga “a bit much”.  As we were going through the class today, I paid attention to where my mind wandered.  It occurred to me that “Stretch and Balance” is a fabulous metaphor for life.  I’ll take you through the class and explain what I mean.

Let’s start with the fact that we got there.   Woody Allen once said, “80% of life is just showing up.”  We all know how true that is.  My motivation issue was driven almost entirely by a need to just get started.  Basic physics.  Getting over inertia.  That’s why experts on “getting things done” tend to recommend breaking a big task down into smaller chunks.  That lowers the activation barrier and improves the probability that you will overcome inertia and get started.  Once you get started, things flow.

The class begins with a focus on the breath and some short meditation.  There is a story I remember hearing that I think is attributed to Einstein but I can’t find a reference for it.  This person (let’s say it was Einstein) had a daily half hour meditation practice.  It’s how he started his day.  Upon hearing about how busy his schedule was going to be the next day, Einstein said something like, “Well, I’m going to need to meditate twice as long tomorrow morning.”  There is a general feeling that meditation is a luxury.  It’s something you do when you have the time to devote to it.  The reality is that meditation is something you should do to create mental space for everything else in your life.  I have not been successful at making a daily meditation practice a priority.  Yet every time I do it—and the start of the Stretch and Balance class is a good example—I find myself incredibly grounded and with greater capacity to handle whatever is in front of me that day.  The instructor also asks us to set an intention for the day, like “clarity” or “focus” or “peace” or whatever pops into your head.  I almost always land on “focus”.  Those who have worked with me over the years and suffered with my short attention span understand why that is important.

We move next into really gentle movements.  We sweep our arms up overhead as we inhale, then sweep down as we exhale.  We’ll hold our arms in “goal post” position and gently twist to the right and then to the left.  We’ll drop our right ear to our right shoulder then our left ear to our left shoulder.  These beginning movements are slow and almost seem like they aren’t doing anything.  But we are focused on timing our breathing with the movements, which allows us to stretch longer and deeper as the class proceeds.  I noticed today that when we did the “goal post twist” at the end of the class, I was able to twist so much further!  That meant my muscles were cold and tight at the beginning.  Those slow, gentle stretches started the warm up process and without them I probably would have hurt myself.  How many times in life have I jumped into something new (a new job, a new project, a new activity, a new relationship) and just took off without doing those metaphorical gentle stretches first?  Taking the time to mentally connect your breathing to the new movements of whatever you are taking on allows you to see what’s ahead of you more clearly.  And seeing what is ahead of you more clearly dramatically improves your chances of success.

As the class goes on, we move into deeper and longer stretches.  I particularly appreciate the “hip opening” exercises because my hips are always so tight.  I wrote before about the need to push outside of your comfort zone and used stretching of muscles as an analogy.  I’m always amazed at how quickly my hips tighten up when I’ve missed a few classes.  Similarly, if you don’t stretch yourself out of your comfort zone, you’ll find yourself more hesitant and fearful of trying new things.  Or you stop doing things that used to be easy and natural for you when you were doing them regularly (like driving on the highway or public speaking).  You’ve got to stretch!

Even though we move gently from pose to pose, all of a sudden, I noticed that I was shaking a little and I could hear the quiet (or not so quiet) grunts of strain from my classmates.  This usually starts when I’ve been in downward dog awhile and my shoulders are starting to fatigue, and accelerates when we transition from downward dog to a plank.  I felt it again when we moved into balancing core moves that involved keeping my legs extended and above the mat.  Funny how those gradual transitions suddenly catch up to you and you find yourself struggling a bit.  You want to drop the pose and get relief.  Just when you need to hear it, though, the instructor tells you to breathe into it and reminds you of the importance of a strong core.  How many times in my life has a steadying voice come to support me just when I was about to crack?  I think back to when friends or mentors or sometimes even strangers have appeared in my life with just the right words at just the right time to get me to focus on why I was doing what I was doing, instead of keying in on my discomfort.  I really value the times I have been able to be that steadying influence on others.  That’s why I have always loved teaching and coaching.  The opportunity to give someone the nudge to return to a healthier, more productive focus is a gift to me.

Speaking of “nudges”, let’s talk about the balance portion of the class.  These are predominantly standing movements on one leg (like tree pose) that involve additional movements to confuse your brain.  Sometimes for good measure we close our eyes.  No one gets through the balance exercises without falling out of the poses multiple times to catch themselves.  And that is a GOOD thing.  The goal is not to be rock solid in these poses.  Our instructor reminds us that you only improve your balance skills if you are forced out of balance 25% of the time.  If you are not challenging yourself enough to fail 25% of the time, you are not going to improve.  There are a zillion life lessons wrapped up in that one statement.  First, of course, is the importance of “failure”.  Second is the importance of learning and improving from failure, not beating yourself up over it.  Third is the recognition that balance is rarely a steady state.  Balance involves gentle but constant nudges and adjustments.  I have used the concept of a pendulum before in discussing balance, instead of a set of scales, for exactly this reason.  Balance (in all things) requires constant attention and constant adjustment.  Getting out of balance occasionally is just an opportunity to get better at getting back into balance again.  Embrace it.

We end the class with a short meditation again, lying flat on our backs.  I love this part.  My muscles are all warm and tingling a bit.  My mental state is calm yet really focused.  I feel like I could take on anything!  So, yes, “stretch and balance” is a darn good philosophy as well as a good physical activity.  Challenge yourself on that—every day.

Dealing with a Lack of Motivation

I’ve been staring at that blinking cursor for a minute or two, debating how to open this essay.  It began on the treadmill this morning, thinking about coming up to the office to write.  My plan had been to try once again to rewrite an essay I’ve been working on for literally months.  Just can’t get it right.  I normally look forward to this task.  Writing is a joyful experience for me, albeit sometimes immensely frustrating.  While I usually need a deadline to actually get myself to put fingers to the keyboard, I am always thinking about writing and I look forward to those times I actually do it.  Not today.  When my mental response to thinking about working on that essay was, “ugh,” I knew I had an issue.  I’ve been struggling with a lack of motivation in general for weeks now.  I’m not sad or depressed (I don’t think).  I’m not sick (I don’t think).  I’m not just sitting around doing nothing.  I get done what I need to get done and I still can laugh and have fun.  I’m just not feeling motivated.  So, I’m going to do what I often do when something is eating at me.  I’m going to explore it through writing and hope to understand what is behind it by the words that end up on the page.  Knowing that dealing with periods of low motivation is something everyone faces at one time or another, I thought sharing this thought process might help others, too.

I wrote about motivation this past fall.  (Read part one here and part two here.)  It was helpful to go back and read those essays, but they weren’t really addressing what is nagging at me.  What does this lack of motivation look like?  I haven’t been going to the Y more than once a week, which means few vigorous workouts.  I’ve been going on long walks outside or on the treadmill, but these are more opportunities to catch up on podcasts or read emails than elevating my heartrate.  I’ve had trouble focusing on reading, which is also uncharacteristic.  My mind has just been wandering too much.  I’ve been playing a lot of games on my iPad.  I haven’t even been motivated to watch recorded TV shows.  I haven’t been writing consistently in my journal.  I’ve been allowing myself “high WW point” treats a little too often.  Let’s just say I’ve been giving myself a LOT of grace.  I am a champion grace giver.  And, honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. 

I think what bugs me the most is that I don’t feel like I’m living in the present.  Throughout much of my adult life, I was living for the future:  “I’ll be happy when….”  I was getting through each day, each week, each month working toward getting to some milestone—completing a big work project, getting through a difficult personal time, doing some project on the house, finally getting to go on vacation.  But once that long anticipated event happened, there would be something else in the future that I would focus on that I thought would bring relief.  Ever since I met Trish and especially once I retired, I have been living in the present.  I have everything I could possibly want and feel extraordinarily blessed.  I am truly grateful every day.  The problem right now is that I feel like instead of living in the present that I am more…existing.  (Before you start to comment, I know it sounds like I’m depressed, but stick with me a bit here.)

The next question I have for myself is, “What’s happened?  What moved you from ‘living’ to ‘existing’?”  Honestly, I think the cause is getting shoved out of my routine.  Chalk this one up to the long list of “pandemic impacts”.  We have established that I am a homebody and, due to my fortunate life circumstance (retired, financially comfortable, enjoy cooking, like spending lots of time with my wife), the pandemic restrictions have not really been a hardship on me.  Don’t get me wrong!  I very much enjoy traveling and being with friends!  I’m just not used to it right now and restarting these activities has been, frankly, disrupting.  Our two week trip to Utah in March was fantastic (except the journey home) and a true bucket list experience.  But it threw me out of my routine and I can’t seem to get comfortable again.  Of course, I’ve allowed myself to get a little too busy.  I went to see my family in Atlanta a few weeks after coming home from Utah; I’ll be going to Baltimore for a long weekend to hang with college friends between penning this essay and publishing; and, the following weekend I’ll be going back to Atlanta for Mother’s Day.  In between all of this, Trish and I are kicking off some serious renovations on our house, including a big redo of the kitchen.  I am super excited about this, but talk about disruption!  We plan to move out of the house in the fall when the work begins and we have about three million decisions to make before then.  Interestingly, it’s not the decisions that are disturbing me.  I’ve been having fun researching appliances and annotating the designs.  It’s thinking of going through the process—packing up half the house, moving out, moving back when it’s all done—that has me overwhelmed.  It’s like climbing a mountain to get to the valley on the other side.  You know that the valley is worth the effort to climb the mountain, but all you see in front of you is that big hill.  There’s a lot more.  I cut out a whole discussion about the progression of my glaucoma and the things I am doing to save my sight and how I obsess about that.  I cut out some family issues that have me distressed.  I cut out lack-of-sleep stories.  Trying to keep this to under 1500 words!

The final question is, “What do I DO about this situation?  How do I get myself back?”  Writing, of course, helps.  It helps me better define what’s nagging at me.  Once it’s defined, I can face it.  Writing also gives me the accountability.  I’m not just talking about putting this out there for those who read my work, or even the fact that now my mom and sister will probably keep checking in on me until I can report progress.  It’s mostly about creating accountability within myself.  I don’t just want to exist.  I’ve worked too long and too hard (both at my career and on myself) to not take better advantage of every day in front of me.  It’s a conscious choice every day—do I allow myself this moment of low energy or do I push myself to take that first step?  I am acutely aware of the activation barriers I need to overcome to do something.  Those barriers can be easy to overcome (“Get up and cook dinner if you want to eat at 6:00.”), a little more challenging (“Put make up on every day again, even if just to cover the dark circles under your eyes from the glaucoma meds.”), or significantly challenging (“Go to spin class.  You know you’ll feel awesome afterwards.”)  Go back to those first steps around personal accountability and intention.  What is important to you today?  Just today.  You know those little successes build.  Pick one thing that is important for you to do (or not do) today.  Getting this first draft done was my one thing today.  That felt good.  Maybe I’ll pick another.

Stopping yourself when you slide into a motivational dip is important.  No one is going to do it for you.  Own up to what is causing it.  Writing does that for me.  What works for you?  Give yourself enough grace to take the pressure off but not so much that you don’t take that first step.  I think I’ll be bookmarking this essay for future reference.

CODA:  I’m editing this essay after the trip to Baltimore for a college reunion.  It was three exhausting days of overeating, overtalking, and overenjoying life.  It was also just what I needed.  I thought I’d come back and pick up my struggling just where I left off.  But, after a couple of days of sleeping excessively and eating oatmeal and beans, I am raring to go!  So, here’s a good message:  feeling a lack of motivation?  Go spend time with people outside of your daily bubble who love you.

Things That Drive the Scientist in Me Nuts

Consider this a Public Service Announcement.  Or just a rant.  And pity Trish:  she has to hear me “go off” about these things all the time.  I would like to think that writing about this topic is a way to get it out of my system, but who am I kidding?  I will most likely continue to correct TV announcers for the rest of my life.  Herewith, a short list of things about the non-scientific part of the world that drives the scientist in me nuts.  Daily.

The word “data” is a plural noun.  The singular is “datum” but you hardly ever hear that used.  Instead, the word “data” is used as a singular noun.  Of which it is not.  One might say, “The data shows that….” Or “The data is clear on that topic,” but one would be WRONG.  This item is one of those little seemingly insignificant things that, once pointed out to you when YOU use it wrong, sticks in your craw forever.  Like “I could care less” or “chomping at the bit” or “irregardless”.  For the record:  it’s “I couldn’t care less” and “champing at the bit” and “irregardless” isn’t even a word!  Use “regardless” or “irrespective”.  We are veering from science to grammar a bit but my point is about using words in a way that shows that you understand them.  There is an awful lot of that in the scientific community—using jargon in a way that indicates lack of understanding of real meaning.  I can forgive the non-science world for using “data” as a singular noun since it is probably the only way most people have heard it used.  However, any scientist (or journalist) should know better.  Now this will drive you bonkers just like it does me.  You’re welcome.

Significant Digits Matter.  This explanation must begin with a story.  When I was between my junior and senior years in college, I stayed up in Baltimore to continue my undergraduate research work.  I was young and just getting my first exposures to what real “research” meant and I had only a cursory understanding of what I was doing.  My advisor would send me up to Swarthmore College on a regular basis to use an instrument there.  While there, I worked side-by-side with two students from that school who were much more capable scientists than I was.  We were all doing similar work and would have a research review to discuss our results each Friday when I was there.  I was showing a table I had put together presenting the data I had collected that week.  The guys were snickering and whispering to each other.  Finally, they laughed out loud and said, “Look at all those significant digits!”  I wanted to drop through the floor.  The instrument gave me a string of numbers.  I put that string of numbers in my table.  If the instrument reported a value of, say, 1.942583, then that’s what I put in the table.  I did that with each entry, so the screen was a sea of long numbers.  The problem was that the “confidence” in the measurement was only to the second decimal place.  There was no real difference between 1.942 and 1.944.  I should have just reported 1.94.  Most of you have probably fallen asleep by now (Trish does) but I have a serious point.

Let’s take an example we hear about regularly:  We’re in an election year (Ugh).  What if I told you that Candidate A leads Candidate B in the polling by a measure of 52.4 to 47.6.  Sounds like a significant lead, no?  But if the margin of error is +/- 3 points (not uncommon) then this race is a dead heat.  Polling numbers should never be presented to three significant digits, but they often are.  And then they are over interpreted.  The pundits go breathless analyzing what Candidate B is doing wrong when there is really nothing definitive they can say about the race!  This happens all the time when data of any sort are presented in the news.  No one seems to know how to put numbers in context or certainly use the correct number of significant digits.  How do I know if any number is meaningful when I have no context?!  You  know what commentary is like on monthly jobs reports.  New jobs went DOWN by 20,000 from the month before!  We must be heading for a recession!  Millions will be out of work again!  Food lines!  Crime increases!  BE AFRAID!  Of course, new job numbers are regularly revised by well more than 20,000 each month since collecting accurate data is difficult.  THIS is why I am constantly yelling back at the news. 

When I taught Freshman Chemistry in grad school, I taught the lesson about significant digits in the first week of class, but deducted points all semester long if significant digits were wrong in calculations.  When someone complained that the topic was from the first week of the semester, I’d answer, “And clearly you didn’t learn the lesson.”  Significant digits matter, if for no other reason than to keep you from going crazy when you watch the news.

The Scientific Process is not Widely Understood.  This issue has been magnified as we’ve gone through the COVID pandemic.  Never have I seen the scientific community communicate so poorly nor the general populace demonstrate their lack of understanding of the Scientific Process so profoundly.  It was literally painful to watch the news each day.  The Scientific Process basically works like this:  First, you form a hypothesis.  Your hypothesis may be something like “wearing masks helps reduce infectious spread of viruses” or “pharmaceutical A can cure people of COVID-19”.  Next, you devise experiments to test that hypothesis.  Those experiments must be carefully designed so that you are sure you are testing only the question in your hypothesis.  You have to articulate all the little assumptions that you are making about what might or might not affect what you are measuring so you can account for all those other influences on the results.  Designing experiments this way is really difficult!  Then, there must be enough data such that your conclusions can be statistically valid.  You run your experiments.  You analyze your data and draw your conclusions.  If the results don’t fit your hypothesis, you can modify your hypothesis and/or design more experiments to gain additional insight by changing your assumptions.  Maybe, for instance, pharmaceutical A only works if administered within 3 days of infection.  Or maybe there were people who got relief from COVID-19 when they took pharmaceutical A but it was not BECAUSE they took pharmaceutical A.  We’ve already discussed the danger of anecdotal information.  Finally, you have your peers review your assumptions, experimental procedures, data, and conclusions and have them tell you everything you did wrong.  Science is so much fun!  But, in following this process (which takes a fair amount of time), you get reliable results, not anecdotal information.  It’s not fast.  It’s not fun.  It’s kind of boring.  But it WORKS.

There are other topics.  Like the fact that the general populace tends to use “chemical” as synonymous with “toxic chemical”.  Or the common assumption that if something occurs in nature it is, by definition, “natural” and therefore safe and healthy.  Last I checked, arsenic is naturally occurring.

And that brings me to my final thought.  When I asked my niece (a plant pathologist) for her thoughts, she reminded me that what often bugs her the most is how annoying the ego of scientists can be!  Hmmm.  I have often described understanding chemistry as like learning a foreign language.  If you don’t learn the early stuff well, anything more advanced is totally unintelligible and is either suspect or just misunderstood.  I was lucky.  I had the interest coupled with good early teaching.  Most people are not in that situation.  Maybe, then, I should get down off of my pedestal and not let these things bug me so much!

[Editor’s Note:  Can I hear an AMEN?]

About Anecdotes

An anecdote is really just a story, focused on a particular person or situation.  Merriam-Webster defines an anecdote as “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident”.  I do love storytelling—I am, after all, a writer of sorts.  And I’ve used storytelling all my life, particularly during my work years.  Nothing helps sell a customer or a business plan or a job like a good story.  So, anecdotes have a strong positive side.  But they also have a negative side.  Anecdotal information can be misleading or, worse, misdirecting.  Since I recently spent a lot of time on airplanes and in cars, I’ve had time to ruminate on anecdotes a bit and we’re going to unpack that a bit today.  (This is why Trish rarely asks, “What are you thinking about?”)

What better way to start a discussion on the power of anecdotes than with a story!  I’m sure you’ve all seen the commercials for Prevagen, a supplement sold as a way for those of us “of a certain age” to improve our memory and mental sharpness.  When I first noticed the commercials (it’s been on the market since 2007), the manufacturer made some pretty specific claims about the clinical effectiveness of the pill.  Then I started reading about claims that the product didn’t work, that the company was being sued for false advertising, and that the FDA had come down on them pretty hard.  The product is still available, of course, but the commercials no longer refer to clinical studies that prove efficacy.  Instead, the commercials show folks from various walks of life giving testimonials as to the benefits they ascribe to taking Prevagen.  This is not false advertising.  I have no doubt that there are people who firmly believe that there is a causal connection between taking Prevagen and improvements in their mental function.  They can tell their stories.  But their experience does not prove a broad, scientifically valid clinical effect of the product.  (Brace yourself.  There is probably an essay on the Scientific Method coming.)  These stories are just that—anecdotal information relevant only to the storyteller.  But it can encourage others to think, “Well, maybe it will work for me, too.”

In a situation like the story about Prevagen, it’s pretty harmless if someone accepts an anecdotal testimonial as being broadly applicable, or at least applicable to themselves.  As long as the supplement is safe to use (not guaranteed by the FDA, by the way), then the biggest harm is parting with a bit of money and pride.  It’s also mostly harmless when you are providing examples from your own experiences to teach a lesson, such as all the stories I tell when I’m coaching someone.  The key, of course, is to keep in mind that these are examples and, as the disclaimers on all those commercials remind us in teeny, tiny print:  individual results may vary.  When I launch into my story of the random walk that was my career progression, I always provide the disclaimer that these were my experiences associated with my particular situations at the time I was going through them.  The idea of telling the story is not to say, “This is what I did, so if you do the same things, you’ll have the same outcome.”  It’s to start the conversation to dig deeper to understand what may have led to the outcomes I had and what is relevant to the situation the listener finds themselves in at the moment.

Anecdotes run rampant within our news media, of course.  I subscribe to a daily news digest called The Flip Side.  Each day, they pick a current topic and then present a sampling of commentary from the conservative right and the liberal left.  The two sides rarely disagree on the same statement.  Rather, they choose anecdotes that support their view and ignore anecdotes (and data) that support a different view.  Neither is wrong, really.  They are choosing to focus on different aspects of a topic.  A conservative might focus on the fraud and waste of our social safety net programs.  A liberal might focus on the success stories of how these programs brought families out of poverty or gave people a chance to pull themselves up with the support of basic assistance.  They are both right.  There are many examples of both waste and success.  These programs are never going to get better and more effective, though, if we only focus on the stories we prefer.

To really dig into what I mean, I am going to share an anecdote from our recent travels.  While we were in St. George, Utah, for a week, we found a little sports bar that we really liked.  We liked it enough to go there two nights in a row and we liked our server enough to ask for her table when we came for the second night.  So, let me tell you a little about Sandra.  We were asking her about life in Utah and she told us a bit of her story.  As part of that, we learned that, as a server, she earns only about $2.10/hour in wages since there is an expectation that she’ll make up the difference between that and the minimum wage through tips.  But she needs to share her tips with the bar staff and the bus staff.  She works six days a week and just can’t make ends meet.  She and her partner lost their house in the housing bust in 2009, they can barely make their rent payments now, and they are expecting a rent increase when their lease renews shortly.  She plans to move into her Mom’s house, renting a basement apartment from her.  She has no idea if they will ever get any further.  Her attitude was fairly positive, considering.  She is a very hardworking, nice person who just can’t get ahead in this world today.  We left a nice tip on the credit card check and then gave her some extra cash to put directly into her pocket.  When we did that, she looked a bit horrified and said, “I didn’t…I wasn’t asking for…” but we wanted her to have it.  So, what are we to do with this information (besides having this blog post go viral and everyone in Utah patronizing Guru’s in St. George and giving Sandra huge tips)?

One temptation is to say, “This is what’s wrong with our economy today!  Hardworking average people just can’t get ahead!  We must increase wages and reduce housing costs.”  Another response is to think, “Clearly, she’s made some poor choices and made her bed.  Hardworking honest people can get ahead if they work hard enough.”  My response?  Ask more questions.  Thanks to Google, I know that the Federal requirement for tipped workers is indeed $2.13/hour with an assumption of $5.12/hr in tips, taking the presumed wage up to the current Federal minimum of $7.25/hr.  Besides Utah, 15 other states hold to this minimum and another 15 states don’t crack $5/hr in wages before tips.  Let’s say that Sandra works 50 hours/week and manages to get that average in tips to bring her wages up to $7.25/hr.  That’s $362.50/week or $18,850 per year, before taxes.  A 2 bedroom apartment in St. George rents for about $1000/month.  It’s a pricey place.  But they still need servers who can afford to live there.  Even if Sandra’s partner brings in the same wages, they barely clear the recommended hurdle of 30% of gross wages on housing.  

The data tell us her situation is tight.  But we know no more than that, and that she seems like a good person.  I can’t tell you anything more about Sandra’s situation and history.  I can’t tell you what she could have done differently.  I don’t know if she makes good choices or not.  I’m not going to pass judgment on her or the large number of people in her situation.  But this anecdote reminds me that there are a lot of people in her basic situation and struggling.  You can choose to believe her story is representative or that it’s an outlier.  You can call up any number of anecdotes to support whichever solution you prefer to these and other problems.  And you know what?  Everyone is a little bit right.  Our world is complex enough that multiple solutions will be required to address the range of situations in which people find themselves.  All we can do is this:  ask questions to understand how representative is the anecdote you are hearing.  Is this situation wide spread or rare?  Regardless, remember the humanity and uniqueness of the persons involved.  Everyone needs a little understanding and often a little help at times.  We’ll talk about judgment next time.  And, of course, always tip your server well!

Flying Is No Longer Fun

When I was traveling regularly for business, I toyed with the idea of writing a book called Road Warriors.  It would be a collection of essays about business travel gone hilariously wrong.  We all had stories and usually shared them over dinner or while waiting in airports.  They were funny upon the retelling; they were rarely funny while they were happening.  So, in an effort to speed up the “funny” associated with this story, I am writing it down and sharing it with you.

It all began innocently enough at 4 am on Saturday March 19th.  Although, really, does anything begin innocently at 4 am?  Trish and I had just wound up a glorious two weeks trekking around Utah with friends, visiting the Big Five National Parks there, a National Monument, three state parks, and finding a really excellent Sports Bar we went to for dinner two nights in a row (more on that next time).  This was the trip we were supposed to do in March of 2020, just as COVID hit.  It was something of a redemption trip.  Getting our lives back to some sort of normal.  We couldn’t have asked for a better time!  We had excellent weather.  The Parks were breathtaking.  We were happy and exhausted and ready to come home.

My alarm woke me at 4 am, which should have been my first clue.  I never sleep until the alarm.  I am always so nervous that I will oversleep that I wake up every 15 minutes all night, checking the time, and then usually get up 15-30 minutes before the alarm.  I staggered to the hotel bathroom and took a shower.  I had gotten dressed and was checking my phone when Trish got out of the shower and I saw a text from United.  Our 7 am flight from Salt Lake City to Denver had some ill-defined technical issue and was delayed.  Until approximately 4 pm.  No indication that any further connection to Philly was forthcoming.  Ugh.  I sat in stunned and tired silence for a minute gathering my thoughts and trying not to cry.  Trish heard my “Oh no,” and waited with bated breath for me to explain.  We decided to go to the airport anyway and find some other way to get home.  And thus the odyssey began.

I put in my AirPods, called United, and began the On Hold journey.  As we piled into the shuttle to the airport at 5 am, I apologized to the other passengers in case I actually got a human and started either yelling or crying or both.  We got into the reticketing line by 5:15 am.  There were only maybe six groups before us.  This shouldn’t take long.  Meanwhile, I did get a live person on the phone.  Let me say right now that any ranting I do in this essay is not addressed to the good customer care people at United.  They were, to a person, very nice and patient and, except for one fool, competent.  There is only so much you can do when a system is entirely messed up and you have limited freedom to take any action.  I spent an hour and a half on the phone with this woman, mostly listening to the United theme song on hold.  That jingle now makes me twitch uncontrollably when I hear it.

There is just no slack in airline schedules these days.  None.  A flight gets cancelled and you have very few options.  Every flight is full.  Especially when you are trying to leave Salt Lake City during spring skiing season.  I am all for airlines making money since a profitable airline should be a safe airline, right?  And I do know that right now, United is losing money.  At least what they officially report.  I also know United bought back over $500 million in stock last year and over $2 billion in stock in 2020.  And their executives were showered with millions upon millions in bonuses.  But, hey, filling every seat means reducing Average Cost Per Seat Mile, so why leave any slack?  I’ll tell you why not.  Because some version of Catbert the Evil Finance manager has calculated that dealing with the occasional irate customer is cheaper than being able to get a replacement plane to Salt Lake City.  Well, this irate customer has a blog and a Twitter account, @united.

It took that hour and a half on the phone to come up with this plan:  fly from Salt Lake City to San Francisco; sit for four hours; fly from San Fran to LA; sit for another four hours; take a red eye to Newark; figure out how to get from Newark to Philly on your own, loser.  I chose to put that plan on hold since, hey, we were only four groups from the counter now and how long can THAT take?  I can see that this essay will be 5000 words if I relate every detail of this story, but suffice it to say that the natives were getting restless and complete strangers started to plot together on how to get rid of the crazy lady in the white jacket who had been at the counter for—I’m serious—three solid hours.  There was literally a round of applause when she finished.  Ron at the counter did his almighty best for us but all he could do was confirm the above itinerary and off we went.  Slowly.  We had nothing but time.  With all that extra time, I kept trying to make something happen.  No one seemed to be able to upgrade us further than Economy Plus (which is as much as an improvement as it sounds) without the CEO signing off.  Each person I talked with sent me to someone else who “may have that power”.  Never mind that we counted six pilots sitting in First Class on our flight to LA.  I’m all for happy pilots, but not when I’m shoved in next to someone who hasn’t showered in a week and plays incessantly with his AirPod charging case.

The good thing about Trish and me is that we rarely melt down at the same time.  At least, it hasn’t happened yet, or if it has the trauma has wiped it from memory.  For the next 24 hours, we took turns melting down.  We kind of hate people to begin with and there were a lot of people on this journey.  We made an unspoken agreement to suspend our rules of trying not to judge other people (ok, it’s my rule, and I’ve been struggling mightily with an essay about that anyway) and we amused ourselves with a running commentary on the idiocy of pretty much every person who crossed our path.  Why can’t people use headphones?  I don’t need to hear the music with your TikTok videos, nor listen to you on speaker phone talking about what Joey did to Ricardo or your Aunt’s gall bladder.  What saved us from disaster was an episode of the My Favorite Murder podcast, which distracted us for that last hour of waiting in LA.  (Thank you, Beth, for turning us into Murderinos.)  Fortunately, all those flights went smoothly (no fights over face masks or kicking the seat) and we touched down in Newark at 5 am Sunday.  Even more fortunately, we were able to arrange a ride home.  You’ll also be happy to know that our bags made it to Newark Saturday night.  They were able to send the bags ahead, just not us.  Had I known, I would have stuffed Trish into a duffle.  She prefers the cold anyway.

Here are my takeaway thoughts on this whole fiasco.  Flying is a pain in the ass, but we all knew that already.  Airline companies have taken all the joy, along with our legroom, out of the process.  Even the elite flyers, who get all the perks, look as angry and disgusted as the rest of us.  They cram more and more people onto planes and their process for dealing with disruptions involves more pain for the customer.  Customer-facing employees with the airlines, however, are almost always good people trying to do their best in the face of a system stacked against both them and us and with almost no freedom to act.  Treat them with kindness.  They display a degree of patience that we don’t deserve.  I wonder if the airlines are handing out Xanax behind the counter.  And, finally, people in general have forgotten what it means to be out in public.  I miss common courtesy.  My advice it to just put on your headphones to block them out.  Take a deep breath.  And, when in doubt, listen to murder podcasts.