Author Archives: Sherri

Every Ending is a Beginning

The origins of this essay come from a recent trip home to Atlanta to see my family. We were in a Shabbat service, the Saturday after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The Rabbi at my Mom’s retirement community was talking about how lopsided the Torah was at this time of year, meaning almost the whole scroll was rolled up on one of the ends.  We read a section of the Torah each week during Shabbat services and the sections are determined such that in one year’s time, we read the whole thing. A couple of weeks after Yom Kippur, we complete the annual cycle and, during the holiday of Simchat Torah, reroll the Torah and start again. The rabbi was talking about the importance and symbolism of this process of reading and re-reading the Torah every year. “We celebrate the end of the cycle,” she said, “in part because we are excited to begin a new cycle. We don’t mourn the ending because we realize that every ending is also a beginning.”

That comment struck me, in part, because the primary reason I was there was to recognize my Dad’s yahrzeit—the anniversary of his passing. We lost Dad twelve years ago, one week and one day after Yom Kippur. Recently, a good friend lost her mother and during that service, the priest talked not about death, but about transition. That resonated with me as well. Her soul was transitioning to its next phase. Her earthly life had ended; her heavenly life was beginning. Many of us continue to feel the presence of a loved one long after they have died. I feel that way about my Dad and my maternal grandmother. I always feel their presence. I don’t think of their deaths as an ending, but as a transition to whatever is next; a beginning.

As I continued to ruminate on this topic, I began to understand how broadly that thinking could be applied. Throughout our entire lives, we are experiencing endings and beginnings but we don’t necessarily see the connections. We don’t see how those endings are really beginnings and that the beginnings can’t happen without the endings. A prime example that comes to my mind was a forced work transition I went through in the mid-2000’s. I had a career path in my mind that I was trying to make happen. It just wasn’t working but that didn’t keep me from continuing to beat my head against a wall. Finally, I was moved into a different position (which was a whole lot better than just being fired). I was devastated. I thought my career was over, that I’d never realize my dreams, that I was an utter failure. But that ending was actually the most awesome beginning I ever could have imagined! The job I was moved into turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding roles in my whole career. I loved the work; I loved the people; I loved what I was learning. And that role led to my next career change which took me in a direction I never could have achieved had I stayed the course in that previous role. This was a realization in hindsight, mind you. Don’t think that I was Ms. Maturity in how I approached that transition! I ended up super happy in spite of myself, not because of any healthy attitude. But it taught me that important lesson of looking forward and not mourning what could have been.

There are so many examples each of us have on how we’ve handled endings. School transitions are a good one. Grammar school to middle school to high school to (maybe) college to (maybe) grad school to your first job. In each case, you leave something that is familiar and known and head into the Great Unknown. Some people focus on the ending—leaving friends, a routine, even just a place that feels comfortable—and struggle to embrace the beginning. Others wave goodbye to what is ending and run headlong into that beginning. I’ve written before on the fact that there is no one path to success or happiness, that what is most important is what actions you take once a decision is made or a path chosen. This recognition that every ending is a beginning is a big part of that mindset.

Personal relationships of all types follow this thought pattern as well. It has been said that people come into our lives “for a reason, a season, or for life.” This means that relationships, even very close ones, can last for a short period of time around a particular need, for a longer period of time, or throughout your whole life. It is not a failure if you part ways once a relationship has run its course. That ending will only lead to a new beginning—for each of you. Some friendships need to end, just as some romantic relationships need to end, to allow each of you to grow. No doubt it’s often very hard to see that during the time period a separation is occurring. What’s dangerous is getting stuck in the ending and focusing on the loss instead of learning to treasure the value brought by the relationship. As a wise friend once reminded me, that hole in your heart is not loss—it’s an opening. Everyone who has crossed my path over these six decades has taught me something and helped create the person that I am today. Without all those experiences, all those endings and beginnings, I wouldn’t be the “me” that met Trish. Every one of those endings lead to a beginning that kept me moving forward.

I’m remembering that now, as we asymptotically approach the start date for our home renovation. (A little math humor for my STEM friends.) The house is all packed up. I’m sitting in a folding chair in an empty living room with no art on the walls. It feels like my first apartment in my 20’s! I feel uprooted; unsettled. It feels very much like an “ending.” I know, though, that this discomfort is really about a “beginning.” Remembering that helps me find my way forward, just like it did every time I changed schools or jobs or even relationships. It’s scary when something ends and something new begins. Let the possibilities of the beginning excite you.

Unsettled

The first rule of writing is “write what you know.”  When I first started this blog almost four years ago (yes, it’s been almost four years), I had a lot of pent-up writing energy around the kinds of topics that kept coming up when I coached younger employees.  Now that I’ve mostly exhausted that list, my writing is inspired by whatever is going on in my life at the time I sit down to type.  Not surprisingly, observations about life always seem to tie back to those coaching lessons.  Human beings in life and human beings at work are still human beings.  The same rules tend to apply.

As I mentioned several essays back, Trish and I are embarking on a major renovation of our house and I anticipated that stuff surrounding said renovation was going to dominate my writing for a while.  There was a flurry of activity in the spring and early summer as we went through the selection process around design and then a lull as we awaited our construction date.  Well, that date is nigh upon us and for the last many weeks, Trish and I have been getting ready to move out of our house so the guys can have the run of the place.  The process has been, shall we say, unsettling.  And being unsettled is just no fun.

I’ve touched on this topic before from some different angles.  I talked about pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and the needed coping energy.  Today, as I was “leaving it all on the bike” at spin class, I was ruminating on this whole unsettled thing and, despite all my learning and growing and stuff, it still can throw me for a loop.  I’m trying to get back to a more even keel, so I’m going to write about it and you’re coming with me.

I have to begin by admitting that I clearly lead a very cushy life.  While the pandemic stressed a lot of people to the max, little Ms. Retired Introvert here settled into a very comfortable existence.  I’ve always been a homebody and the pandemic reinforced that tendency.  Adding to that the weight loss journey Trish and I went on during lockdown and finding out that I actually like to cook, I got really REALLY comfortable staying in my cozy little home bubble.  I am enjoying getting out more again, for sure.  But I always look forward to walking in that front door.  However, “walking in that front door” is different now as we live amid boxes and empty walls.  I know the valley is beautiful but all I see right now is the huge mountain in front of me that I first need to climb.

This feeling of being unsettled is manifesting in a number of ways.  First and foremost is disruption of routine.  I can’t seem to write.  My journal has sat untouched for weeks and writing these essays has been sporadic and a bit painful (particularly for my editor who has been using a lot of red ink these last months).  I don’t seem to be able to focus to read, which is another self-soothing activity.  That means magazines and email digests are piling up alongside books and that makes me anxious.  Some days, I just don’t know what to do with myself.  I’m nudgey.  And, I’m sure, annoying.  Here’s a fun example:  Trish was on the land line when the builder called on her cell phone.  Since we have been waiting anxiously for him to give us a start date, she implored me to pick up the phone and deal with the call.  Brian wanted to stop by Monday at 10:00 and I said, “Great!”  When Trish got off her call and I relayed the message, she asked why I didn’t push for a later time so it wouldn’t mess with her/our exercise schedule.  (We are, at least, desperately clinging to our exercise routine!)  I, then, burst into tears since that is how I deal with any stress or extreme emotion.  (Bassners have an extra tear duct.  We’re known for being a bit weepy.)  She tried to back track but is unsettled herself so it resulted in me stamping my foot and saying, “I’m going upstairs!”  It’s been a little rough around here.

Once I got upstairs, I tried to write.  That didn’t work.  I tried to read.  That also didn’t work.  So I slammed down the top of my laptop and went back downstairs.  “We need a list,” I said, being a good Virgo.  Since Trish is also a good Virgo, we made a list of everything that has to get done before the construction starts inside the house.  It’s still a disappointingly long list, but writing it down at least got it out of our heads.  It also gave us discreet tasks we could do, which is also a good thing for Virgos.

I’ve identified two things to get me through this unsettledness.  The first is to be present, which is a pretty good tool to get through most difficulties in life.  Know what one of the best things is to force me to be present?  When our 25 pound Maine Coon-mix cat, Beau, decides it’s snuggle time.  He will announce his presence with a forceful meow, jump up on your lap, settle his bottom on your lap and, forcing you to slouch, spread the rest of himself up your chest and under your chin.  There will be a little kneading of tummy and then he will settle in.  Your job is to hold him so he feels secure and kiss the top of his head between his ears.  That is all you are able to do with that much cat on you.  So, while that warming, vibrating (purring), heated blanket is on me, I am just present.  I think about what I want to write.  I think about what I want to do.  I kiss the top of his head again.  There is nothing better to calm you down.

The second thing I do is choose just one thing to get done today.  “Begin by giving yourself a little grace,” I say to myself.  “And choose just one thing to get done.”  Today it is getting this draft done.  I’m pretty sure I’ll get more than just this one thing done, but if that turns out to be it then that’s ok.  I think back to the stressful time periods in my life.  Some of them were time bound and fairly short, like preparing for this construction.  Some of them were open ended and exhausting.  One nice thing about being older is that I’ve known shown myself I can get through these things, big or small.  As I wrote recently, it gets better.  There’s nothing wrong with being unsettled.  It’s part of life.  It makes for good stories when you get out the other side.  Take a deep breath.  Do one thing.  Yeah, I do believe that was a coaching lesson!

Picking at Scabs

I am not talking literally, of course.  Sometimes picking at a physical scab is necessary and it’s always gross, but I don’t need to write an essay about it.  I’m talking about metaphorically picking at scabs—when you just can’t let something go.  This is a huge issue for me (see: Righteous streak, mile long) and has put a strain on my marriage here and there, not to mention other relationships.  You, too?  Well, then!  Join me in a little written therapy session as I try to gain some insight into this behavior.

Here’s a typical situation:  You are having a conversation with someone that has become something of a debate.  It could be a discussion of current events, or defending a project proposal, or answering questions at meeting, or even just discussing the reasons behind someone’s behavior.  You walk away from that discussion feeling unsatisfied, that you just haven’t gotten your point across.  Often, you’ll wake up at 3:00 am and say to yourself, “THAT is what I should have said!” 

I, personally, don’t like to be misunderstood, so I get rankled when I don’t think I’ve been heard or when I can’t think of a response quickly enough to persuade my debate partner.  I will noodle over the conversation for days, replaying the dynamics and imagining my more eloquent responses.  Sometimes I will talk it over (and over and over) with someone, trying to get my words right.  Most of the time, I just turn it over (and over and over) in my head.  I spend a lot of time reworking conversations.  It’s exhausting.  But at some point, I am going to want to correct the record.

There are a number of reasons that I might pick at a scab with you.  They are all interconnected but by far the primary reason is because you matter to me.  I care what you think and how you feel about me because you are important to me.  Take that as some measure of solace when I keep nagging you about something that you’ve either forgotten about or don’t want to talk about or consider so minor that you can’t believe I am STILL picking at it.  If I feel that I have been misunderstood by someone who matters to me, I can be relentless and endlessly annoying in trying to make my points heard.  If you are not important to me, then after maybe a brief period of feeling annoyed or wronged, I will (mostly) let it go. 

This issue is trickier at work.  You want to correct the record, but in the workplace, there is often a power imbalance that makes picking at scabs inappropriate or even detrimental to your future success.  As referenced in earlier essays, I lost a big power struggle at work just before a new senior leader joined the company.  I wanted him to know The Truth (or at least my truth) but he was totally uninterested in the past.  I knew he was forming an opinion of me based on other discussions but my attempts to provide my perspective was just picking at a scab he was uninterested in discussing.  Sometimes you just have to the swallow the injustice and hope that an ally will support you at the right time.  This is why I am glad I am now retired.

I will admit that while I return to issues mostly because the other person involved is important to me, I also will continue to argue because I truly believe I am right.  If you matter to me and yet you disagree with me, I will often do whatever I can to make sure that you see the light.  It’s not about me being right.  It’s about not wanting YOU to be wrong.  This, of course, is a tricky rationalization that happens to be tightly wrapped up in the third reason I will pick at scabs with you:  my long-standing fear of being blindsided, of being rejected, and my self-doubt.  What if I’m actually wrong?  After first resisting that possibility with all my might, I will listen carefully (and usually research on the web) to see if I really AM wrong.  I like to think that after years of years of keeping those errors to myself, I will now readily admit when I remembered something wrong or just didn’t have the facts straight.  Just because I believed something to be true doesn’t mean it really was true.  I go back to my favorite Brené Brown mantra:  I’m here to get it right, not be right.

I’ve been thinking about all this because we are in the Hebrew month of Elul, the run-up to the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement).  It’s a time of significant introspection; a time to take stock.  As such, I tend to think about people I have wronged over the past year, knowingly or unknowingly, as well as those with whom I’m laboring under some misunderstanding.  It’s a time to make amends.  But sometimes it’s just not that easy.  Maybe I don’t even know that I should be apologizing.  Maybe the recipient doesn’t want to hear it.  Maybe they think they were wronged by me, but I was misunderstood.  Maybe all of the above.

Where this takes us, then, is to some thoughts on being the recipient of scab picking.  When someone is nitpicking with me, I try to remember all the dynamics running through my head when I’m the one nagging.  First is to give that person the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe you HAVE misunderstood them.  Maybe there are facts you’ve missed.  Then, truly listen to what they have to say.  From personal experience, I’ve learned it is really important to repeat back to them whatever they are saying to you.  If you don’t recite their argument to show you’ve heard them, they will just keep on picking at you until you confirm they have been heard.  If you still disagree, that’s the time to argue back.  I am well aware that there are people out there who argue for the sake of arguing or who only want YOU to hear THEM and not vice-versa.  That’s not who I’m talking about in this essay.  I’m talking about regular human beings who just want to be heard and understood and hopefully validated.  I promise you that if you can do that for others, they will do it for you.  And then maybe we can all learn a little something, turn down the temperature on all the division, and stop waking up at 3:00 am with the perfect comeback!

It Gets Better

The day this essay publishes will be my 60th birthday.  As I’ve been thinking of what I wanted to write about as I hit this milestone, I keep going back to memories of my 50th birthday.  I was, to put it mildly, not in a good place.  I was adrift in so many ways!  Personally, I had been unattached for a little over a year and at that time found myself “sort of involved” in a very unhealthy non-relationship.  I was 25 pounds heavier than I am today and trending upward.  Professionally, I was in a great job that I found really gratifying and paid really well, yet also was more frustrating than any role I’d ever held.  The stress I was under felt unrelenting.  As I approached that milestone birthday, I fell into a real funk because my life was just not where I thought it would be (or where I wanted it to be) when I pictured “life at 50”.  Worse, I didn’t really see a pathway to making things better.

I marvel, then, at my life today as I approach 60.  I can honestly say I’ve never been happier.  While my life is not perfect, it’s pretty darn good.  First and foremost, I’m five years into a marriage that I honestly never thought would happen.  I cannot believe my good fortune in finding Trish and all that has come with this relationship.  My worst professional fears came true when my job was eliminated in the midst of an epic corporate power struggle which I lost, yet I was relieved when it happened!  I weigh the same as I did in grad school 35+ years ago (although, admittedly, distributed a bit differently).  I am incredibly fortunate to be financially comfortable and reasonably healthy.  I have an amazing best friend who stuck by me during those bad years and continues to share these good ones.  I am surrounded by family and friends.  I am living in the present, enjoying every moment, and feel that gratitude every day.  How on earth did this happen?

The picture that accompanies this essay is of a U-shaped curve representing “happiness,” or satisfaction with life, as a function of age.  Not surprisingly, we tend to be happy as children and then start a long downward slide through puberty and early adulthood.  There is often a little uptick in your 30’s, when most of us start to hit our stride personally and professionally, but as I learned, happiness tends to bottom out right around age 50 before starting a rise that continues through the rest of your life.  There are a range of hypotheses offered to explain this dip, often referred to as a mid-life crisis (although few of us will live to 100, which just adds to the angst).  For me it was that realization of “I’m not where I want to be and I feel like I’m running out of time.”  For many it is also a time of being caught between the demands of growing children and aging parents or when money troubles really hit hard.  There are lots of reasons for this bottoming out, but why does it begin to rise again, as well as continue to get better the older you get?

Since I’m too lazy to do a comprehensive review of the available literature on this topic, I’m going to take my usual approach of just sharing my thoughts on this matter.  I believe I’m getting happier and happier not (just) because I have a fairly cushy life now, but because I’ve finally realized that if you keep pushing forward, if you keep doing what you believe are the right things to do, then things can get better.  In short, I’ve become more resilient.  I’ve written on resilience before and I did find it instructive to reread that essay before writing this one.  However, while I looked at resilience from a more tactical perspective in that essay, I’m leaning on a more emotional perspective today.  To explain what I mean by an “emotional” perspective, let’s look at the title of this essay.  It is a loose reference to the tag line of The Trevor Project, an organization that provides counseling and support for LGBTQ youth.  The signature outreach effort of The Trevor Project is a series of videos made by famous and non-famous LGBTQ adults with this simple message:  “I know it seems really bad right now.  But it WILL get better.”  There are no tactical lessons on HOW to get to “better,” just the emotional assurance that it WILL get better.  Sometimes, that’s exactly what you need to hear.  Lord knows, I could have used The Trevor Project (or just the dang internet!) when I was a teenager.  And let me tell you:  teenage Sherri would look upon 60-year-old Sherri with awe.  OK, maybe not “awe” but at least thinking, “Could that really be ME?”  Yes, Sherri, it gets better.

Resilience, I believe, is a learned skill and one that you choose to develop, whether consciously or not.  I also assume there is some truth to the Nietzsche saying, “That which does not kill you makes you stronger.”  We all have stories of trials and tribulations and I don’t need to recount mine here.  Suffice it to say that there were times throughout my life when I really could have benefited from someone saying to me, “It gets better.”  Maybe they did.  Maybe it was in a kind word that someone said to me after a particularly difficult day at work.  Maybe it was within advice that Mom or Dad gave me when I probably didn’t want to hear it (but needed to anyway).  Maybe it was one of the many, many times Beth forced me to get out of my own head by going to run errands together or on one of our many trips to Vegas.  Maybe it was a bit a grace that came along with a deep breath as I tried to settle myself down to sleep at night.  All I know is that I kept putting one foot in front of the other and kept moving forward.  Life has a funny way of sending you what you need if you just stay open to whatever that might be. 

Fittingly, I was tested over the days between the first draft of this essay and these final edits.  In rapid succession, I was hit with two emotional “body blows”.  The first fed right into my lifelong fear of rejection and being blind-sided.  The second brought up my career long feelings of Imposter Syndrome.  I struggled that first night, complete with anxiety dreams.  The morning brought a little distance and perspective that allowed me to think things through (and talk them through with Trish).  By the following morning, I was back to myself. Somehow, I seem to have become a fairly resilient person.  And I truly believe that I will continue to follow that “happiness” curve upward, regardless of what the future brings.  That doesn’t mean it will be all sunshine and rainbows, but it does mean the trend line will continue to move upward.  Remember this when you are having a tough day, or a string of tough days.  Keep taking steps forward.  Stay true to yourself.  It gets better.

Training the House Chippy

It’s around 8:00 in the morning and Trish and I are sitting down by the lake.  The sun is up.  We hear the birds and squirrels chirping and calling, as well as the occasional fish snapping up the bugs that buzz just above the lily pads on the lake surface.  Nature is very peaceful, but not quiet. You have to sit very still to pick out all the little sounds around you.  One of those sounds is the rustle of a chipmunk working its way towards us. It never takes a direct route, protecting itself by skittering this way and that.  Trish is sitting on the dock, at the ready with her phone camera.  I’m sitting on a bench just off the dock, under the shade of a tree, with a peanut in my hand.  A bag of them sits next to me on the bench.  We need a plentiful supply.  We are training the chipmunks down by the lake to take peanuts from our hands.  It’s a slow process that requires a lot of stillness and patience.  Perfect activity for a few days at the lake.  And a perfect place and time for a writer to tease her next essay out of her brain.

I’ve been writing about the concept of Community in my last couple of essays and this one continues on that theme.  First, I wrote about how generally insular we’ve become, how the pandemic has just made that worse, and about how giving things away using our local Buy Nothing group has given me some connection to our local community.  (For those who read the Buy Nothing essay, you’ll be happy to know that I had a nice chat last week with Steve, the guy who took all of my Great Courses DVDs, when he stopped by to claim a few items from our garage purge “curb alert”.)  Then, last time, I wrote about how important rituals are in binding a community together and how we’ve lost so much of that in these last decades.  This past week, spending time at this magical lake that has played such an important part in Trish’s life, I’m finding myself reflecting on the importance of shared history and how that binds people together into a community that can span generations.

We’ve been down here about an hour or so this morning.  The chippy is getting a bit more comfortable or at least less nervous.  I started by scattering some peanuts on the ground when we got here yesterday.  They were gone this morning, so I scattered a few more in an arc around six feet from me.  One by one, those peanuts were stealthily snatched up as the chippy worked its way in using its random stop and go pattern, stuffing a peanut into its cheek pouch and then skittering back off to the den to store the peanuts for winter.  The next test was a big one—I put a peanut on the toe of my sneaker.  While we waited for the chippy’s next approach, Trish and I watched a grey heron land on the lily pads at the end of the lake and start fishing.  And we talked about our conversation from the day before.

I had been expecting to have the small lake to ourselves during our weekday visit.  The lake, about a mile long by half a mile wide, is ringed by rustic cabins (read: outhouses) that rest on state game lands.  It is indeed quiet this week, just not empty.  We stopped in on her uncle, ultimately hosting a small happy hour to visit with his wife and him.  We went for a walk after dinner, stopping in on another couple whom she’s known for decades.  We then chatted until dark, on a dock by the lake, with their daughter, now married to the son of another “lake family”.  We are staying at the cabin owned by our stepdaughter and her family.  She grew up at this lake with Trish, playing with the girl who is now the woman with whom we were talking.  Connections run deep here.

All of these conversations were about shared history of the lake.  Trish’s father helped build several of these cabins when he was a boy scout.  She spent summers in the cabin her family owned and eventually owned a different cabin on this lake herself.  Cabins were passed on to children in Trish’s generation and now their kids are taking ownership and raising their own kids here on summer weekends and vacations.  As the sun set on our conversation that night, this woman was talking with Trish about sitting down together and capturing Trish’s oral history of the lake community.  She wants her generation and the generations that follow to understand their deep connection to this place and the people they see here. 

Back in “the day,” most people didn’t move very far from their families and where they grew up.  Even if their own household wasn’t multi-generational, relatives lived close by and neighbors were involved in each other’s lives.  Families were raised together and shared history was passed down, generation to generation.  Whether you realized it or not, you felt a part of something bigger than yourself.  Maybe it was just your extended family.  Maybe it was the neighborhood you lived in.  Certainly, we’ve become more mobile over the decades.  In addition to being distant from our extended families, we seem to have gotten into the habit of not really engaging much in our local communities.  Our stories don’t go back generations.  Our sense of ownership stops at what we physically own ourselves because we have little connection to anything else.  For this little lake community, understanding the history and their connection to it is what engenders a sense of responsibility to not just their cabin and what they own, but to the community as a whole.  And feeling responsible for the well-being of your community is critical to that community’s health.  I think that’s what we’ve been missing these days.  We don’t feel responsible for each other.  We’ve either lost our shared history or never took the time to learn the local history and become part of it. 

By the end of our few days at the lake, I’ve gotten the House Chippy to take a peanut directly from my hand.  It’s important to sit very, very still as the chippy approaches.  It can take five minutes or more for him to work his way up to you.  I only seem to have patience like this at the lake.  He would have climbed up into my lap, but I was wearing shorts and he kept sliding back down my shin.  Next time, sweat pants.  I’m training this chippy not just for my own enjoyment but also so that others can sit here and have the little thrill of this wild animal (admittedly adorable) feeling safe enough to approach me and interact with me.  It’s something people who have lived on this lake have done since the cabins were built in the 1930’s.  Surely the great-great-(great times x)-grandparent of this chippy had done exactly this with the first owners of this cabin.  If we do things right, the (great times x) grandchild of this chippy will be taking peanuts from hands long after I’m gone.  And whoever is handling those peanuts will be telling their children stories about Trish and me and the importance of preserving this lake community for their own kids.  Hopefully, this sense of community responsibility can extend beyond this magical place.

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.