We spend our entire lives negotiating, and for the most part we hate it.  I, personally, hate negotiating for a variety of reasons.  For one, it always seems combative and I dislike conflict.  Related, I always fear that I’m being taken advantage of or that I’m leaving something on the table.  And finally, if I want to avoid those first two feelings, I need to do a lot of homework.  Since we’ve already established that I’m a basically lazy person, it is understandable that I dislike negotiating.

You can’t get away from it, though.  You negotiate terms of a job.  You negotiate to buy a car.  You negotiate ALL THE TIME with your partner on everything, including “little” daily things like chores around the house, what’s for dinner, and what you watch on TV.  Back in the day when I used to travel a lot for business, I regularly paged through those inflight magazines they used to put in seatback pockets.  Those magazines were riddled with advertisements geared to the business traveler and invariably there were several on negotiating skills.  A famous one had in bold letters across the top:  You don’t get what you ask for; you get what you negotiate.  The inference, of course, is that blindly just asking for what you wanted or needed was a fool’s errand.  You must get confrontational and NEGOTIATE—take them for all they’ve got!  It’s not surprising, then, that most people treat negotiating like a war game.  Or just a war.  It is about winning.  It is about getting what you want and making the other guy give up more than he really wanted to give up.  And then I learned about BATNA.  The concept is not revelatory so much as being intentional about applying it.

BATNA is an acronym for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.  Your BATNA is the minimum you will accept.  Your walkaway point.  It’s what you will have if you can’t come to an agreement with the other party.  By definition, you’re ok with that outcome.  Maybe not happy, but you can live with it.  Let’s say you are at a street fair and you walk up to a vendor selling windchimes.  You love windchimes.  Who doesn’t?  You select a set, look at the price tag and think, “Yeah, no.  Too expensive.”  You have a price point in your head.  If the seller agrees to it, you have yourself a new set of windchimes.  If not, you walk away.  Your BATNA, in this case, is “I don’t have a new set of windchimes.”  That’s acceptable to you.  Now imagine that your best friend, who has a big birthday coming up, tells you about this FABULOUS set of wind chimes she saw at a street fair a while back and she is kicking herself for not buying them.  She had even snapped a picture and sent it to you and you could see it was the SAME vendor and SAME set of windchimes.  Now your BATNA is different.  You REALLY want to get those windchimes.  You will probably accept a higher price because the value to you (to please your friend) is much higher.

I learned about the concept of BATNA at a mini-MBA intensive short course that was geared toward R&D managers.  It was revelatory for all of us.  Now there was a logical approach to negotiating that we could navigate and it was not a war simulation.  You “just” had to understand your BATNA and the BATNA of the person you were negotiating with!  If there was an overlap, then you could find agreement.  If not, you both accepted your respective BATNAs and moved on.  Simple, right?  Well, we’re only halfway through the essay so of course it’s not that simple!

Let’s start with understanding your own BATNA.  Sometimes it can indeed be simple.  When I bought my last car, I had to decide if I was going to trade in my old car with the dealer or sell it separately.  I didn’t want to deal with a private sale, so I went to a couple of those places that buy your car and got a quote.  Both gave me EXACTLY the same quote.  After I had negotiated the price of my new car (that’s another, longer story) we discussed a trade.  I had decided that if they matched the quotes I had gotten, I would trade in my car with them.  Why?  My BATNA was not about maximizing the value I could get from my old car.  It was about minimizing hassle.  I’m sure I could have gotten significantly more money if I pursued a private sale, but I didn’t want the bother.  If the dealer wouldn’t match the other offers, then it was minimal additional hassle for me to go to one of those car buying places.  If the dealer DID match their offer, then I would get the same monetary value with even LESS hassle.  They matched.  I drove my new car home that day. 

Other times, knowing your BATNA is not so straightforward and this is why being intentional about understanding your BATNA is so important.  In the example above, I could have tried insisting on a retail price for my trade because I might have felt that I should get the Blue Book price.  Anyone who is a car dealer has, I’m sure, dealt with the “but my car is worth so much more than that” customer.  I didn’t do that because I understood the trade-off between the price I could get for my car and the hassle associated with getting that price and I intentionally chose to value low hassle over high price.  Deciding on a new job or moving to a new home are good examples of more complex BATNA calculations.  There are a lot more factors to consider than just the salary or the housing costs.  There are many, many factors in determining your BATNA that have to do with what truly makes you happy or at least content.  Teasing out those factors requires a really authentic look at yourself and honestly accepting what you know works for you and what doesn’t.  How many of us have made unfortunately bad choices because we established our BATNA based on what we wished represented our true desires instead of accepting what we really want?  That doesn’t mean you can’t make a bold choice aimed at broadening who you are, but you need to make that choice purposefully and accept the work it will take to make that happen.  If you are not purposeful about it, you end up putting yourself in the situation and hoping that you will suddenly find yourself happy in a context you’ve never been happy in before.  How well does that usually work?  This theme of authenticity is so critical!  Yes, Brené Brown seems to work her way into all of my essays.

The other, even tougher, part of the BATNA equation is understanding the BATNA of the negotiating party.  In addition to forcing yourself to take an authentic look at the situation from your own perspective, you now need to put yourself in the shoes of the other party and tease out what is truly important to THEM.  In a business setting, this involves sleuthing around the other party’s business model and financial position.  If you are negotiating project deadlines with a co-worker from a different function, you have a much better chance of finding agreement if you take the time to understand their business function and how their needs intersect with yours.  If your idea of negotiating a timeline is, “This is when I need it.  Period,” then don’t expect a lot of cooperation. 

While business negotiating often involves personal agendas, negotiating with the people in your private life is ALL about personal agendas.  When you are negotiating a vacation with your spouse, it involves understanding what they like to do and not do, as well as knowing the range of their travel preferences and what their breaking points are.  Surely there will be negotiating room between your two BATNAs.  If not, you have a different problem.  Understanding someone’s BATNA is synonymous with expressing empathy.  And expressing empathy means being able to be non-judgmental and accepting that someone else’s preferences are just as valid as your own.  It’s pretty easy, though, to forget about diversity of preference when we’re negotiating with someone.  Our way is the way that makes the most sense for us, therefore it should be the right way for everyone, right?  Your BATNA should never be everything you could possibly want.  Compromise is not a dirty word if you can be honest about your BATNA and keep an open mind about someone else’s.  So, the next time you’re negotiating with someone or arguing righteously about some topic, take a moment to step back and ask not only “what is my own BATNA” but also “what’s your BATNA”.  You just might find some common ground.

During my last couple of years working, I had the great luck to work with a Regulatory Services business that Intertek owned.  I say “great luck” for a couple of reasons: 1) this is a fascinating business that I knew very little about and I learned so much in my time working with them; and, 2) I had the pleasure of getting to know several fascinating people, including the person who inadvertently helped me write this essay and to whom it is dedicated.

This Regulatory Services business is a consultancy that assists companies in navigating a range of regulations often focused on public health.  The part of the business I worked most closely with was Chemical Services, which helps companies understand the regulations associated with chemicals in their products and how to comply with said regulations.  I had worked with this type of business in my earlier days as a bench chemist when I was developing specialty chemicals used in Industrial paints and coatings.  I, of course, felt that because I had this cursory exposure to the industry that I was “knowledgeable”.  Unsurprisingly, I found out very quickly that I was not.  Or, rather, that I knew just enough to be dangerous.  We’ve touched on this topic before.  Thanks to Karen, I know much more.  Which only seems to make me more dangerous.

The Principals in this business were very kind and patient with me.  Maybe it was because the business is located in Canada and Canadians are pathologically nice.  Maybe it was just because they were incredible people.  During one of my early trips, my host planned a half day of hookey with me.  We spent the morning in the office outside of Toronto, filling my brain.  At lunch time, we took off and headed south.  We drove through the adorable town of Niagra-on-the-Lake.  Had lunch; did a little shopping.  We drove through wine country (alas, no tastings) and down to the Canadian side of Niagra Falls (clearly more beautiful than the American side).  Karen and I talked all along the way about a zillion things, including more about the business and building my understanding.  It was during this trip that Karen fed me that immortal line that titles this essay: A chemical in and of itself is not safe or dangerous.  It’s the dose that makes the poison.  Depending on the characteristics of the chemical and how it interacts with human systems, a “safe” dose can vary.  Determining that dose, both in the acute and chronic sense, is a difficult undertaking and fraught with conflicting interpretations.  It just ain’t that simple.

That lesson clearly had a big impact on me.  It is partly about risk assessment and, in fact, this essay is a good companion to the one I wrote a few months ago on risk.  It’s a follow on that I’ve been mulling over since that writing.  This idea of “how much of something makes it a bad thing” is an idea we wrestle with daily in all aspects of our lives.  It’s further complicated by the companion question of “is the risk worth it?”  As I wrote in that essay on risk, it’s a wonder that we aren’t paralyzed daily by indecision, but we usually take these quickie risk assessments in stride. 

The aspect of this subject that I’ve been ruminating on a lot lately is this idea that some thing or person or idea is not—cannot be—all good or all bad.  It’s the dose that makes the poison.  In the realm of toxicology, Karen spoke about a few ways of looking at this.  There is the classical S-shaped response curve where something is not dangerous until you reach a critical threshold level—this is what most of us think about when we think of something as a “poison”.  There is the proverbial Goldilocks dilemma—where too little of something is bad and too much is bad, but there is a sweet spot in the middle.  Exposure to oxygen is a good example.  And there is even an instance, called hormesis, where something is beneficial in smaller doses, no more beneficial but not dangerous at some intermediate level, and then toxic above a threshold. Exercise and alcohol are good examples here.

Why am I bringing all this up (besides the fact that I love discussing this kind of thing with Karen)? Well, we’ve had a lot of mental whiplash over this past year of pandemic as the pace of new information has caused changes in the guidance we’ve gotten from experts on how to best protect ourselves and squash the spread of the virus.  (Their often-poor risk communication has not helped.)  I think as Americans (as humans?) we like to have nice, clear cut, unchangeable answers on how to address serious problems.  Mask are good or masks are worthless; the vaccines are safe or they are not; the virus lives on surfaces or it doesn’t; it’s safe to open schools or it’s not.  We just don’t like “It depends” as an answer even though we know, realistically, that’s the case most of the time.  It doesn’t help that we have the companion problem of “if a little of this is good, then a lot must be better!”  If you believe wearing masks helps reduce spread of the virus, then you want to see everyone in a mask everywhere all the time.  And if you think they don’t really help, then you never want to see one anywhere on anyone.  Absolutism helps reinforce our beliefs but it’s the dose that makes the poison.  “Never” and “always” are dangerous words.

Think about sunshine.  Nothing feels better than warm sun on winter-tired skin in springtime.  Doctors even tell us we need sunshine to manufacture Vitamin D!  But spend more than, say, 15 unprotected minutes in direct, strong sun and your skin begins to burn.  (OK, for me it’s 15 minutes; for Trish it’s about an hour.)  That doesn’t mean I should spend zero time in the sun because I will burn.  It means I need to limit the time and/or wear sunscreen.  Think about that one friend or family member who you love dearly but who drinks too much or talks too loudly or keeps bringing up that topic.  It doesn’t mean you never want to see them; it just means you can’t spend too much time together (classic risk management!).  It’s the dose that makes the poison.

I’ve struggled mightily lately with how to put this thinking to work in evaluating our societal conflicts, be they over the pandemic, racial injustice and inequality, or even (ick) politics.  My risk assessment is going to be different than yours. Remember that there are two components of this analysis:  the intrinsic danger/hazard/toxicity of what you are considering, matched against your assessment of the probability of exposure.  We often miscalculate on both!  How can I effectively respect your context and still remain true to mine?  It’s a lot of work to challenge your own assumptions and see the world through someone else’s eyes and experiences.  Even in the data-driven world of toxicology, it can be difficult to put the health risks of certain chemicals into effective safe ranges of exposure.  In our ever-fractured world, we are quick to condemn products or people or even ideas over an instance of negative impact—irrespective of the balance of good vs. bad or the probability of negative impact or even the time and context of said negativity.  We have zero tolerance (ok, now I’m getting into engineering).  But zero tolerance never works.  It’s the dose that makes the poison.

Next week, I’ll be giving a webinar as part of the Lab Manager Leadership Digital Summit.  This will be my first real foray back into a formal “business” setting in over four years.  Oh, it won’t be a difficult webinar to give.  After all, I’ll be pontificating live on a number of the topics that have ended up in these essays and, as my friends are probably thinking right now, “When did you ever stop pontificating live?”  But as I’ve worked on preparing this talk, I keep coming back to one topic that actually won’t be a specific item I discuss there:  Risk.  You see, I’m taking a bit of risk by dipping my toe back into a formal setting and, in particular, advertising this blog at the end of that talk.  I do indeed want more people to read the blog.  But I also realize that with broader exposure comes the risk of trolls and negative feedback.  It also brings the risk that there might be some people who want me to write more.  So, before accepting the kind invitation from my friend and colleague to present, I did a very rapid (like 30 second) risk analysis in my head and decided to plow forward.

Those who know me know that I’m a “no regrets” kind of girl.  I make a decision and take an action and own the outcome, good or bad.  It means that results are sometimes cringe-worthy and embarrassing or even harmful but that I’ve decided that whatever the outcome, I will learn something that will make me a better person.  That doesn’t mean, though, that I make decisions on actions without a risk analysis and attempts at risk mitigation.  We all do.  Multiple times a day, usually without realizing that we do it.  As I’ve been thinking about risk and risk mitigation, a number of thoughts have crossed my brain.  And, as I’m wont to do, I will now get them out of my mind and foist them upon you.

Our ability to control a risk plays a large role in acceptance.  According to the START American Terrorism Deaths fact sheet, in 2016 (the most recent year that stats are available) there were 61 terror attacks in the US (most perpetrated by US residents and citizens) and 68 deaths.  In that same year, there were 10 fatal accidents in the commercial airline industry within the US that resulted in 216 deaths.  Also in 2016, there were an estimated 7,277,000 police-reported traffic crashes, in which 37,461 people were killed and an estimated 3,144,000 people were injured. An average of 102 people died each day in motor vehicle crashes in 2016, one fatality every 14 minutes.  Yet, fear of terrorist attacks is at a feverish level (and focused on the wrong nationalities) and many people are too afraid to get on an airplane for fear of a crash, yet we hop in our cars without a second thought multiple times a day.  Clearly, we accept a much greater risk on the roads, yet we rarely give that risk a second thought.  Why?  Well, part of it is that most of us drive regularly without incident so we feel “safe”.  And a good part of that feeling “safe” is that we feel we control the risk associated with driving.  Plus, we need driving more often to do what we want to do during a day so we gladly accept that higher risk.  We don’t, though, usually consciously think about that calculation until we or someone we know is in an accident.  The illusion of control give us the illusion of safety.  Conversely, feeling you can’t control a risk makes that risk less acceptable, even if probability is really low.

Lack of data on risk does not mean lack of risk.  Several years ago, I attended a large meeting of businesses and government groups associated with the safety of consumer products.  One of the major topics that year was Bisphenol-A, a plasticizer that has been used for decades in all manner of plastic products from the lining inside soda cans to plastic plates and toys.  In the previous number of years, scientific data indicated that there was evidence that BPA is an endocrine disrupter, meaning that your body could confuse it for certain reproductive hormones causing a range of problems.  Endocrine disrupters are particularly dangerous for growing children and pregnant women.  The level of BPA in the blood that could cause problems was under debate, along with how to properly test if BPA in a given product might leach out under normal use and thereby be consumed.  However, “out of an abundance of caution”, governments and product safety groups recommended removing BPA from formulations.  In a rush to do so, consumer product companies tried a variety of substitutes that could provide the same performance properties as BPA (it was in there for a reason) and many landed on a similar compound called Bisphenol-S.  BPS was not burdened by similar data as an endocrine disrupter.  However, there were not similar data because no one had ever needed to TEST BPS for this property!  Well, once we started to use BPS, people started to test it and guess what?  It’s even WORSE than BPA!  The industry referred to this as “a regrettable substitute”.  Regrettable, indeed!  Lack of data does not mean lack of risk.  Remember when I wrote about understanding that there is much “we don’t know we don’t know”? Ignorance may be bliss, but it may also cause you to take on risk you would not normally accept.  This is why scientists can be very paranoid people.

Lack of immediate impact can lead to assuming greater risk.  Tons of examples on this one.  Such as all the highly carcinogenic chemicals I handled very cavalierly in grad school.  If I was careless with a strong acid or base, I’d get burned and would be more careful next time.  If I got careless with alkyl phosphines, I wouldn’t find out for several decades.  I should not know what methyl phosphine smells like, but I do.  I try not to think about that.

And, of course, there is wearing a mask, social distancing and avoiding crowds during this pandemic.  Early on, when we knew nothing about this disease, many of us were scared into isolation while others thought this was just a bad flu.  Nine months in, we know this is not “just a bad flu”—that’s like saying a heart attack is just bad heart burn because they both have chest pain as a symptom—but our calculus on risk has changed.  I was talking with my cousin the other day and we were discussing “decision fatigue”—you have to make all these risk calculations that you never had to make before about exposure doing everyday things.  It’s exhausting!  So, you either don’t do things you’d like to do, which is frustrating, or you take a risk that you normally wouldn’t take.  There are some obvious things most of us adhere to:  avoid big crowds that come together and disperse, like sporting events and bars and big parties; wear a mask when you go into stores and keep your distance; don’t ask a lady in Costco to pull up her mask from her chin (OK, that last one was just me.  She was VERY nasty!).  But what about when you have friends over for dinner and you have 10 maskless people milling around your house for several hours?  Or when you go to the Y, even though there are just a few people lifting weights and they are being careful (for the most part)?  Or you go away for a long weekend to rural areas because you need to get out of the house, but you are still crossing paths with strangers?  We all have pandemic fatigue and associated decision fatigue and it’s probably causing all of us to take greater risk than we would have six months ago.  Look at how I qualified my statements to justify my choices just in this paragraph!

We can’t live risk-free lives.  I written before about the need for balance.  The trouble is we’ll never have enough data to have full confidence in our risk decisions.  I wish you all safety in these difficult times; as much protection from risk as you need to feel comfortable; and, enough coping energy to avoid decision fatigue!

Recently, we finished up an essay arc on the difficult process of creating lasting personal change.  (The last essay in the series is on Commitment and links to the other three are embedded within.)  The example I used throughout the series was the mental gymnastics required to lose weight and keep it off.  As I was wrapping up that last essay in the arc, I noted my frustration that I needed to be a Woman of Means and Leisure to be able to make this change happen.  The reason, I stated, is that we have been surrounded for decades now by a food industry that has normalized a range of really unhealthy eating choices and habits.  Breaking through this normalization, saying to myself, “No! This isn’t right!” was and continues to be a huge effort.  And that pisses me off.  And now you’re going to read about it.

So let’s start by digging into my frustrations with Big Food.  I remember a commercial from McDonald’s when I was little in which they touted the ability to feed a family of four for under $4.  Amazingly, inflation means that the $4 spent in 1970 for four small hamburgers and four small fries is about equivalent in buying power to the $26.84 you’d spend today for four Big Mac Value Meals.  Let’s say you have a small Coke with your hamburger and small fries.  That’s 620 calories.  Today, you get a Big Mac, a medium fry and a medium soda.  According to the McDonald’s site, that will set you back 1080 calories.  SuperSize that baby and you’re looking at 1330 calories.  Now, you could say, “Look how much more FOOD you get for the same inflation-adjusted-dollars!”  Yeah, and I say, “Look how easy and cheap it is to consume so many empty calories.”  In 1970, people were satisfied with a regular hamburger and a small fry.  Today, that would be a snack for many people.  The result?  The US obesity rate is above 36% (tops in the developed world); in 1970 the obesity rate was 15.7%. Today, 10.5% of the population has diabetes and another 34.5% have pre-diabetes; in 1970, 2% were diagnosed with the disease. The top two causes of death in this country are heart disease and cancer, both of which have a strong dietary connection.

I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know by citing these statistics.  Where I’m going with this discussion is to point out how we’ve normalized these kinds of eating habits.  Our store shelves are stocked with all kinds of convenience aids and packaged foods to help save time in food preparation.  Even the fresh produce is often grown from engineered stock that has been bred for size and shelf longevity and not nutritional richness.  My discomfort with this information is that these movements in our national food culture are driven by industry profits, not what is good for us as humans.  Even the “low fat” craze, which looks on the surface to be health-driven, was all funded and driven by the sugar industry!  Don’t even get me started on the restaurant industry.  My point is this:  don’t trust large corporations to make good decisions on your behalf.  Your health is your own responsibility and unfortunately you have to fight corporate profits to maintain it.  I’m not dissing businesses, though.  I’m more focused on how the combination of ubiquitous marketing, the engineering of our food supply for cost and volume, and focus on taste over nutrition has normalized such really unhealthy habits that it would be natural to think, “Well, that’s just how food is.  There is nothing I can do.”  Wow.  And worse: if that’s what is all around you, it’s also natural to think, “Well, it can’t be that bad if everyone is eating like this.”  It’s that bad and you know it.  Hence the incredible mental effort it can take to lose weight, never mind the cost (in dollars and time) of buying and preparing healthy food.

That’s the rant part of this essay: my frustration with how we view food.  It is easy to see the “right” and “wrong” in this issue.  This move away from nutritionally dense food is making us fat and killing us.  But other things get normalized, too, and it’s not always bad.  Let’s talk about air quality.  Also in 1970, Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, along with founding the EPA.  Big Business interests were apoplectic and apocalyptic about the effect of these regulations on economic growth.  By the 1990’s, significant progress had been made in reducing, particularly, industrial sources of air pollution.  Not only did the economy continue to purr along, these regulations spurred amazing innovations in product and process development, like lower emission cars (also eliminating lead in fuels thanks to the need to avoid poisoning those catalytic converters) as well as water based and lower solvent paints.  Addressing regulatory-driven product development needs in lower solvent paints absorbed most of the bench-chemist part of my career, so I got a job from all of this!  Can you imagine, today, going back to the kinds of air pollution we had in the 70’s?  Can you imagine painting the inside of your house with solvent-based paints (maybe even including lead)?  We have normalized an expectation, now, of breathing clean air.  Let’s hope we can keep it that way.  There were plenty of interests then fighting the regulations that led to today’s healthier environment and plenty that, today, say we’ve gone too far.  Let’s hope the bar has been raised enough that we won’t go too far backwards.

The question then becomes this:  when is fighting normalization the right thing to do and when is fighting it just being resistant to change?  Boy, I wish I had a simple rule for figuring that one out.  You could always choose to embrace change that is good and resist change that is bad, but invariably whenever there is a Big Societal Change there are both winners and losers.  The winners will of course champion normalization of the change and the losers will resist.  Unfortunately, history tends to be the best guide to which changes are better overall for humanity, which does not help us make decisions today.  Here is what I suggest: when faced with a change that seems to be normalizing around you, ask yourself who the winners and losers are.  Are you uncomfortable with the change? Why? Think several steps ahead—if this normalization takes root, what are the possible next outcomes?  How do you feel about those outcomes?  Do you have the facts? Face your discomforts head on and challenge them.

I know I can be seen as equivocating when I refuse to give direct statements and that is because it is impossible to make definitive statements about broad topics like this one.  However, I will end on this note:  sometimes you just know something is wrong and you need to fight normalization.  As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Hate and violence justified on arguably flimsy reasons are wrong.  Sowing fear and alarm, particularly with lies, is wrong.  Division and exclusion are wrong.  Further hurting people who are already disadvantaged is wrong!  Listen to your gut.  You KNOW when normalizing a behavior or a change is wrong.  Fight it!

This post is not in any way associated with the movie Frozen or the earworm song referenced in the title to this essay.  But now you’ve got that song stuck in your head anyway, don’t you?  You’re welcome.  Instead, this post is about my recent total inability to just freaking let things go.  Trish tells me I have a restless mind; my noodle is always working.  Writing helps me quiet the noodle, hence the blog.  Lately, though, I seem to have reached some crisis level in driving myself nuts over little things that I just can’t let go.  I have a very short fuse with issues that used to just roll off of me.  I thought it was time for some exploration.

Ideally, this essay would have a nice neat little arc.  I would discuss my righteous youth with a hair-thin trigger and then tell a series of stories that weave together my growth curve through my early adult years.  The story would then culminate with some wise words from my middle aged self about how I’ve become centered and calm, sitting quietly with my hands steepled under my chin as I gaze knowingly into the sunset.  Yeah, no.

The early part is right:  I was a Righteous Youth.  And by “youth” I mean into my 30’s.  I thought I knew it all as a teenager.  Then when I was in college, I realized how little I knew in my teen years; but now in college, NOW I understood.  Then when I finished grad school and started in the “real world” I realized how little I knew in school; but now that I was working, NOW I got it.  Somewhere in my 40’s I finally accepted that I did NOT know it all; nowhere close.  And that actually calmed me down a bit.

As my job responsibilities grew, I found that things that used to really set me off (some shift in geopolitics or an election; some co-worker totally dropping a critical ball or resigning; someone cutting me off in traffic) just evoked a shrug.  Been there, done that; I knew the world wouldn’t crumble.  My active noodle was otherwise occupied with a thousand little stressors and a few heavy duty ones—many with the kind of broad impact that keeps you up at night and gives you heartburn.  It was easy to let the little things go.  By the time I retired, not much could rile me up.  Not even getting fired.  I call it “Forced Perspective”.

Similarly, I learned that I could be a good facilitator, mediator or teacher as long as I didn’t have real skin in the game or feel deeply invested in the topic.  And since I had dramatically narrowed what I allowed myself to feel deeply about, I was able to coach my way around a lot of crises.  Something has happened, though, as I’ve detoxed from my professional years.  My formally work occupied noodle has had to find other things to chew on and boy has it found things!  For instance, I enjoy non-fiction because I love to learn and now I have the time to burrow down all kinds of rabbit holes to explore topics.  Back in the day, I just didn’t have the time and energy to pursue knowledge for fun.  I was just too busy.  But now!  Now if I read a Facebook post on Andrew Jackson, well, I dive headlong into the research to learn more about the man and President and why people find him fascinating and/or repulsive.  And, for good measure, I read about the disaster that was Andrew Johnson.  It’s not always such impressive stuff, though.  I have also recently dug into the origin of hotdogs and when the Phillie Phanatic first came on the scene.  (1977, for those interested.)  This knowledge searching is fun and gratifying!  It becomes a liability, though, when that knowledge searching is inspired by current events.

As a scientist, I go nuts over assumptions—particularly unfounded assumptions people make about data.  In case you haven’t noticed, we seem to have a current issue in this country about how to put data into any sort of useful or productive context, so my frequency of talking back to the TV has increased to a rather annoying level.  It used to just be my rolling commentary on pharma commercials.  (“I feel for people with ED or non-24 syndrome, but can you put some money into lowly antibiotics research?”)  Now, it’s constant talk back regarding the data around community spread, which actions make sense based on the data, and what the First Amendment REALLY says.  Yes, I have read the Constitution. And have a pocket version to refer back to when needed.  This is all creating a bit of tension around the house.

Everything is compounded now.  It’s the pandemic along with the economy along with a reckoning on centuries-old systemic racism all layered with divisive politics in an election year that is only going to get worse from here.  I hear and read things that just make me shake my head with thoughts of “how do they not GET this?” but it just doesn’t STOP there.  I used to pride myself on being able to “listen to understand” but these days I just “listen to refute and convince”.  I seem to have lost the ability to maintain a healthy sense of perspective and I don’t like that about myself one bit.  I can’t let it go.

So then all sorts of little things start getting to me again:  when our torty cat, Bridget, sticks her face in my plate; when teenagers make too much noise in the cul-de-sac (“Get off my lawn!”); when I see someone at the grocery store with their mask below their nose; when I get tailgated (man, I really thought I was past that last one!).  Then Friday night, after another day of all of this crap, I started scrolling through Facebook.  I happened on the recorded live feed of Kabbalat Shabbat services from my old synagogue.  There was my rabbi, with his guitar.  I turned on the sound.  And watched.  And sang and prayed along.  And breathed deeply.  And just….let it all go.  Gaining perspective is a hard fight; it’s even harder to maintain when your coping energy is tapped out.  Recognize that strain within yourself.  It’s probably there, right below the surface.  Try to not stay stuck for too long.  Find whatever will help you let go.  There might be hope for us all yet.