Category Archives: General Interest

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.

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.

Why Is Direct Communication So Hard?

Here’s one thing I think we can all agree on:  no one likes annual Performance Reviews.  We don’t like preparing for them.  We don’t like receiving them.  We don’t like giving them.  And this concept of providing direct feedback—or just direct communication—extends far beyond the workplace.  For some reason, most of us have difficulty sharing our honest thoughts with people.  Sometimes that’s a good thing.  Most of the time, it just creates problems.  The question is:  Why is it so hard?  That’s what we are going to unpack today.

I’m writing about this topic because I experienced a communication miscue when I went home for Thanksgiving.  I’m guessing many of you will have experienced something similar.  When people who don’t spend a lot of time together suddenly find themselves in a room fishing for topics while the string bean casserole bakes, things can happen.  I won’t detail the story here.  Suffice it to say that an opinion was asked for and enthusiastically given; the actual truth came out the next day thanks to a text from another family member.  It wasn’t a big deal.  It just surprised me.  And it got me thinking about communication.

Lack of direct communication is a core competence in many families and social groups, including the workplace.  I believe that at the heart of this issue are two truths:  giving AND receiving direct communication are both learned skills; and, many people believe they are being kind by not telling their truth.  The corollary, of course, is that HOW you communicate makes a big difference in the impact of your statements.  However, I still believe that people hide behind examples of bad “how’s” to avoid speaking honestly. 

Let’s go back to the dreaded Performance Review to discuss how both giving and receiving communication are learned skills.  Most large corporations provide training in this area, but the emphasis is almost always on the “giving” part.  The directions are to: 1)make sure you gather well-rounded feedback on the individual in question, not just information from one or two people; 2)provide specific and/or quantifiable examples of behaviors and actions; and, 3)engage in “constructive feedback” as part of a “compliment sandwich”—provide an example of something positive, give the constructive feedback, provide another example of something positive.  The reasons for the first two are obvious.  The third suggestion is meant to reinforce an important concept—no one is perfect.  We all have things we do well and things we could do better.  That’s what “growth” entails.  But we usually don’t want to hear about the things we could do better, at least not from someone else.  We say we want to hear the truth, but we want “the truth” to be “you are perfect”.

What we don’t talk about often enough is that RECEIVING feedback is also a learned skill, exactly because we don’t like hearing it.  In my field, I worked with a ton of insecure perfectionists (yours truly included).  Many of us, upon receiving feedback from our boss on areas we could improve upon, immediately go down the rabbit hole to “I’m worthless and am going to get fired.”  I had an extreme example of this at one point in my career.  I was preparing to give a performance review to an exceptionally talented individual who was crippled by this insecure perfectionism.  She had a lot of outstanding accomplishments to trumpet.  That part was easy.  She also had a few areas she could have improved upon, although none of them were of high concern.  I simply believe that all performance reviews should provide areas of improvement.  We all can get better at something or learn something new.  Knowing I had a mountain to climb, we first spent a full half hour a few days before the review discussing the skills around giving and receiving feedback and how a good performance review should work.  Since our focus was on mechanics, the discussion was relaxed and productive.  When it was time for the actual review, I reminded her of those mechanics.  She was ready, she said!  I began the compliment sandwich, reviewing all of her many accomplishments.  I then leaned into just two areas I wanted her to focus on for improvement and growth.  You would have thought I’d run over her dog with a truck.  Her face dropped and she totally shut down.  I never even got to the second string of compliments.

At the root of that behavior is one of the big “why’s” of why direct communication is so hard!  It is that to be open to speaking or hearing a real truth, you must first fight that internal battle of authenticity:  knowing your authentic self, learning to like that authentic self, and being able to be vulnerable enough to share that authentic self with others.  To paraphrase another of my favorite Brené Brown mantras:  Work on your own shit so you’re not constantly taking it out on others.  The authenticity part is hard enough.  To be able to be vulnerable enough to others requires mutual trust and respect and, wow, we all know how difficult and scary that can be.  That is why being authentic and vulnerable are two of the most difficult and courageous things a person can do.  I am most assuredly still working on that.  Those of you who know me and have known me at different points on my journey know that I am absolutely not the poster child for direct communication.  But I have gotten a lot better.  Part of the reason is the experience that comes with age—seeing how much better things work out when you find the right way to be direct and listen without judging.  A big part has been finding the right partner.  (This is my contractual obligation to compliment Trish so she continues to edit my essays.)  Seriously, though, our ability to communicate directly and compassionately has not just led to a strong relationship.  It’s given me the confidence to be direct and compassionate with others.

Which brings us to the final point I want to make.  I said above that people often feel that avoiding direct communication is compassionate.  It’s usually not.  And it is often used as an excuse when you are fearful of a negative reaction.  What it often leads to is passive/aggressive behavior in an attempt to hint at true thoughts, sometimes using another person, and that just leads to worse feelings.  Most of us do want to hear the truth or at least honesty.  What is required to do this well is good old empathy.  Ask yourself if there a power imbalance in the relationship.  Is this person new to the group or new to you?  What might make them uncomfortable to hear what you are saying or hesitant to say what they need to say?  What can you do to make them more at ease?  It’s important at this point to say that you can only control your own behavior.  If you make the effort to smooth the way and they still choose to resist or, worse, employ passive/aggressive behavior, so be it.  Their discomfort might explain their behavior but it doesn’t excuse it—nor would it excuse your behavior if you chose to take that route.

Direct communication is a constant challenge for me—both giving and receiving.  While not the perfect empath, I have found myself paralyzed by trying to consider the impact of my actions on others.  But I’m trying to get better every day, every chance I get.  If we all keep doing that, then little by little, direct communication won’t be so hard.

It’s All Relative

With that title, what could this essay be about?  This is being published just before Thanksgiving, so maybe it’s about spending time with family.  It could be another essay on Perspective (you can read a previous treatment here).  Maybe it’s about Einstein and the Theory of Relativity?  I do like throwing in a little science here and there.

Let’s start with Einstein.  No, I’m not going to teach you about the General and Special Theories of Relativity.  First, I don’t understand them at all, much less have enough knowledge to teach others.  Second, it’s not really the theories I’m interested in, but how Einstein first got his inspiration that led to them.  What I find very cool and very inspiring about Einstein is how he used curious observation about the world around him to develop a deep understanding of said world.  In one of his “thought experiments,” he puzzled about trains.  Let’s say you are riding in a train and you’ve got a baseball in your hand.  You are tossing that baseball up and down, just playing with it.  To you, that baseball is simply moving up and down in a straight vertical.  But to someone outside the train, watching the train go by, that ball is also moving forward at the speed of the train.  We’re not talking about two separate balls, here.  It’s the same ball being tossed around by the same person in the same train.  But the perceived movement of the ball—either straight up and down, or translating forward as it’s moving up and down—depends upon the observer.  An observer in the train sees the simple vertical movement.  An observer outside of the train sees the parabolic movement.  This concept forms the basis of our thesis today:  what you see in the world depends upon you, the observer.  Two people can look at the same thing, like the characters in the cartoon accompanying this essay, yet see something very different based on their position as the observer.  Just as important, they may each think they are right and the other person is wrong, but they are both right.  It’s all relative.

I got to thinking about this while on a little getaway last weekend.  This getaway involved several hours driving on highways with lots of other cars—something I haven’t done a lot of these last couple of years.  I am always struck by the fact that when we are driving along, we are mostly only aware of our speed relative to the speeds of the cars around us.  Some are going a couple miles an hour slower, some a few miles an hour faster, but we’re all moving somewhere around 70-75 mph.  As the observer inside the car, you usually forget about that absolute very fast speed.  If you are standing by the side of the road and someone goes ripping by you at 75 mph, you have a true (and scary) sense of exactly how fast that is!  However, inside the car, you are really only aware of the difference in your speeds, which makes you feel like you are moving much slower.  In my opinion, that makes people drive much less safely.  They follow more closely, they cut over more quickly.  They are responding to that small relative difference in speed instead of the absolute speed at which everyone is tearing along.  And now you all can be as petrified as I am on crowded highways!  (This is why Trish does most of the driving.)

This impact of the observer also comes into play in how we perceive our own politics.  It highly amuses me to know that almost everyone considers themselves a “centrist”.  Why?  Well, first, your own opinions seem eminently reasonable to you so therefore you believe they should be eminently reasonable to everyone else.  And since you believe all reasonable people should agree with you then you must be centrist.  Additionally, you can ALWAYS find someone more to the right of you and someone more to the left of you.  Therefore, once again, you MUST be centrist.  Some of us admit to being center-left or center-right, but the “center” dominates.  (If someone can’t find others more extreme to them on the right or the left then they probably don’t care to be labeled centrist anyway.)  That’s a big part of the reason that Congress always has such a low approval rating.  Everyone has their own idea of what is reasonable and productive legislation.  Unless Congress produces exactly that, you will promptly label them idiots.  So no matter what they pass, a good chunk of the electorate will think they are wasteful and incompetent. (I still don’t understand why anyone would go into politics.)

There is another part to our views on public policy, too.  The priorities that you’d like to see Government act upon are absolutely aligned with what YOU consider important.  And what any individual considers important will depend highly upon their individual situation.  A business owner wants to see low taxes on their profit, minimal regulation to restrict how they do business, and sufficient infrastructure and services (police, fire) to enable them to conduct business.  A local resident might look at that same business and want to see limitations on how much of their waste stream gets dumped into the local environment because the discharges stink and make it hard to breathe at times or their water bill keeps going up because of increased treatment costs.  Someone else might want to see that business go away entirely because of the traffic snarling their neighborhood due to an abundance of truck traffic.  And someone else might want to see the business expand because they need a job.  Everyone wants to see their tax dollars spent on things they see as important and not spent on things they don’t see as important.  But here’s the thing:  everything is important to someone!  Your idea of “waste” is someone else’s lifeline!  And the job of the government is to support the needs of the whole populace, even when those needs conflict.  At least, that’s the theory if not the practice.

So why am I rambling on about all of this?  It’s because I try to stay aware of this “impact of the observer”.  Like Atticus Finch, I try to walk a metaphorical mile in other people’s shoes.  Many times, people focus on a different aspect of an issue because they are simply making different choices on what they consider most important.  The business owner prioritizes profits over environmental impact.  The land owner the reverse.  It doesn’t mean the business owner doesn’t care at all about the environment (hopefully) nor that the land owner doesn’t recognize the importance of profit.  It’s a matter of what they consider MORE important.  They both can be right.  The challenge is balancing both priorities.  No one gets everything they want. 

This pattern of thinking and discussion can make people think I am wishy-washy because I often challenge anyone who offers only an authoritative viewpoint.  I’m not wishy-washy, though.  I have my opinions but I stay open to new information.  As a scientist, I’ve been trained to almost never speak in absolutes.  I am constantly looking for new data to challenge my hypotheses.  Newtonian physics explained the whole world until it didn’t.   The rise of Quantum Mechanics did not invalidate Newtonian physics.  It just put boundaries on the conditions in which it is valid.  There is no such thing as a theorem that is proven true—you can only say that all current data are consistent with the theory.  So, as you sit around the Thanksgiving table with family this year (see what I did there?  Wove it all together!), remember that you may see things differently, but it doesn’t mean someone is wrong and someone is right.  You just have different priorities and different perspectives.  Your job is to work to see things from that other perspective.  It’s all relative.

[DISCLAIMER: Before you start commenting up a storm, I’m not talking about people who have fallen prey to conspiracy theories and misinformation.  There’s just nothing you can do about that.  Smile and change the subject to football.]

Motivation Part II

It’s 7:18 am.  I’ve been awake since 3-ish, on and off, and up since 5:30.  Why?  In part, because today (Friday) is the day that I knew I needed to get up and put electronic pen to paper for this essay, which is due to post on Sunday.  Crunch time is upon us and my most effective intrinsic motivator (my self-imposed deadline) has finally gotten me on this computer.  Beau has given up trying to jump up on my lap for morning snuggles.  Mommy is focused.

As we discussed last time in the first essay around motivation, even though I love to write and get enormous satisfaction from it, I still require a bit of motivation to actually do it.  I’ve been writing this essay in my head over the two weeks—I’ve even jotted down notes to remind me of points I want to make—but sitting down and actually drafting and editing rarely seems to happen until the deadline is upon me.  That’s the motivator I’ve discovered I need.

We talked about motivation in general last time, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and more deeply about personal motivation through the examples of my own struggles.  This time, I want to talk more about motivating others, as well as how lessons on motivating others can give you some insights into motivating yourself.

There is a huge body of work on motivating others, particularly in the workplace.  I’m sure most of you reading this have been to at least one training class on this topic.  Not surprisingly, there is no consensus on what actually works.  This is because we are talking about motivating people, not, say, carbon atoms.  I’m a chemist so you know you’ll get science analogies!  If I want to “motivate” a carbon atom to bond with, say, an oxygen atom, I know how to do that.  A carbon atom is a carbon atom is a carbon atom.  And the reaction is well studied and will work every time since I can control the conditions to my liking.  Unlike carbon atoms, all people are different and even if I COULD control conditions to my liking, each person will respond to different sources of motivation.  Frustratingly, even the same person will respond differently depending on the context.  For example, fear can be a powerful motivator but circumstance is critical.  If you fear for your life, you will be motivated to do extraordinary things.  You may even be highly motivated if you fear for your job.  But if a manager chooses to regularly motivate his staff through fear and intimidation coupled with the threat of firing them, he will get the bare minimum effort he requires and even that only for a short period of time.  I am fond of saying that the difference between a good organization and a great organization is the discretionary effort put in by people.  Few choose to put in consistent, excellent extra effort out of fear.  Shame is another poor choice of motivation.  It might get you one action out of a particularly reluctant colleague (and make you feel better for an instant), but likely the trust in that relationship will be gone.  If you choose to use shame, it had better be worth it.  If you consistently use shame, don’t expect to be a manager for long.

There is a lot of controversy over the use of incentives for motivation, be it in the workplace or with, say, kids.  I was subjected to a segment on financial incentives during a leadership training program in which the takeaway was “financial incentives never work so don’t bother proposing them to us.”  My belief is that well crafted financial incentives do indeed work, but only in the right context.  If the work environment is toxic, if no one believes in the mission of the business (or has no idea what it is), and if the reward is really small compared to the effort, then I agree that financial incentives won’t work.  Nor will dangling days off, or a big celebration event, or any other “reward” that requires the recipient to actually appreciate the workplace and their co-workers.  Get your culture right, first.

Peter Diamandis, of X-Prize fame, is one of the most annoyingly optimistic people I’ve ever met and he has some good thoughts on getting that culture right.  I subscribe to his blog, geared towards entrepreneurs who want to do really big things.  I am not one of those people, but I appreciate his perspectives and how his thinking challenges me out of my relentless incrementalism.  In a recent blog, he talked about employee motivation.  For workers to be motivated to do great things, he says, they need three things from you and the culture you create in your company: 1) Autonomy—the freedom to work within a framework that is not overly restrictive; 2) Mastery—the opportunity and support to get better and better at what they do; and, 3) Purpose—self-explanatory, but which I will dig into more below.  If you create an environment in which your employees have these three things, he says (and I agree), they will do Great Things.  The devil, of course, is in the details.  Creating this kind of culture and maintaining it clearly fight against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  It takes a lot of work and a lot of nurturing, which is why it doesn’t happen that often.

So, let’s talk about one particular aspect of that environment: purpose.  In my leadership life, I tried to always be clear with the organization about what our high level business goals were (sales, profitability, scientific excellence and differentiation, etc.).  Once they were stated, I’d work with individuals to connect their particular goals and responsibilities to those business goals.  This “line of sight” in goal setting helps to instill that sense of purpose.  If you understand how your efforts contribute to the larger goals, that is a piece of the motivation puzzle.  Of course, you have to believe in the mission of the business and the worthiness (and achievability) of the goals, as well.  Plus, you need feel trust in and from your workmates to believe that you are not toiling in vain.  This is when financial incentives tied to workplace achievement work.  They work because those extrinsic motivators provided by leadership inspire you to access your intrinsic motivators—pride in your work and your own sense of accomplishment.  That is what gets the job done.

And this brings us full circle, back to motivating yourself in your personal life.  Thanks to a great comment by a reader in response to Part I of this essay, I was reminded of the connection between how I have motivated others in the workplace and how I might better motivate myself—this connection to higher level goals.  It’s easier in the workplace, because those higher levels goals are discreet and measurable and time bound.  And you expect to achieve them!  In your personal life, those higher level goals are aspirational.  You don’t really expect to fully achieve them; your goal is to continually move toward them or at least take actions that are consistent with that aspiration.  I am talking about goals like “I want to be able to grow old maintaining my physical and mental health well into old age” and “I want to treat everyone with whom I cross paths with kindness and compassion” and, for my fellow Jewish tribesmen out there, “I want to embrace my responsibility toward tikkum olam—healing the world”.  Those are big, hairy aspirations.  How do I tie organizing recipes and shelf contents to THAT? 

There’s a clue to that in something I wrote earlier, in Living the Second Quadrant, about living with intention.  This means choosing to do things that are important to me, not just reacting to what others wanted from me or mindlessly doing less important things because they were in front of me and/or easy.  The “how” I do that, this motivational piece, must then be tied to what I consider those high level aspirational goals.  Sounds like a lot of work and that’s the rub.  There’s that Second Law of Thermodynamics, again—nature tends towards increasing chaos and we have to put work into reversing that inclination.  I’m ok with that, as long as I believe in what I’m working towards.  I’m starting to articulate that better.  I’ve got work to do.

Motivation Part I

I started thinking about motivation during spin class last week. It was at that point in the class when I was no longer in a state of flow and was just trying to get through the last 15 minutes. The instructor began an 8 minute journey of pain that involved 40 second sprints followed by a 20 second “rest” period during which you increased your gear so that the next 40 second sprint would be tougher. I was thinking to myself, as I turned up the gear for the fourth time in as many minutes, that I really need an instructor. I could never motivate myself to do this on my own. My memory went back to the time that I was working out twice weekly with a trainer. I was always amazed that I would just do whatever he told me to do. There was one time he was late to our session.  I had done my warm up and thought, “Well, Sean often starts me off with burpees so why don’t I do a set a burpees?” But I hate burpees. So, I didn’t do them. Just as I was trying to decide on some exercise less unpalatable to do while I waited, Sean came in the door and said, “Burpees.  Go!”  And I immediately started doing burpees.

Motivation is a tricky thing. It’s wrapped up in priorities, which we have discussed at length before, but is a separate beast. When I asked Siri to define motivation, she returned this from Dictionary.com: “The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.  The general desire or willingness of someone to do something.”  Reasons, desire, willingness.  Alright, that resonates. So, when you really want to do something (priorities) or HAVE to do something (responsibilities), how do you summon that desire and willingness? And if you are trying to motivate someone else, how do you find those triggers that summon desire and willingness in them?

First, let’s talk a bit about types, or sources, of motivation.  Sources of motivation are either intrinsic or extrinsic.  “Intrinsic” means the source comes from within you.  “Extrinsic” means the source is external to you.  Ideally, extrinsic motivation awakens some source of intrinsic motivation.  Afterall, you still need to make the choice to act.  No one can MAKE you do anything you don’t want to do.  They can, however, provide a stimulus that causes you to CHOOSE to do something that, without that stimulus, you would not choose to do.  Based on that external stimulus, you run a quick cost/benefit analysis and decide that the consequences of not responding to that extrinsic motivator are not worth it (negative consequences) or that the benefits of responding are indeed worth it (positive consequences).  Regardless, you are making a choice to act or not act.  Own that.  (See:  Hot Button of Personal Accountability/Not Playing the Victim.)

Back to exercise as an example.  We have established that I am basically a lazy person.  When it comes to exercise, I need extrinsic motivation.  There are some things I will do on my own, like long walks listening to podcasts or moderate treadmills stints watching videos or reading eBooks.  However, these are rarely very strenuous workouts.  If I want to work out hard (spin, lifting) or go through a routine (stretching, yoga) I need an instructor or at the very least a workout partner.  I just do.  It is not a failing that I am not one of those people who motivate myself to workout hard.  It is an understanding of what type of motivation I need to do strenuous workouts.  Afterall, I can motivate myself to put myself in front of that instructor.  I just prefer to have them make the decisions of what exercise I do next, or the accountability of keeping up with a workout partner.  It’s taken me years to figure this out about myself.  Yet, while I have figured out the exercise thing, I’m still figuring out what kind of motivation I need to do other things that I want to do—or at least things that I want to have completed.

Even writing, something that I really enjoy, requires some type of motivation.  What works for me is a deadline.  This is why I will never write a book, unless I can motivate myself to break down that enormous task into a zillion little deadlines (or find an editor who will do that for me).  I write to a deadline, whether it’s my self-imposed every-two-week blog post deadlines or publishing deadlines for the articles I write for Lab Manager Magazine.  I rarely sit down to actually type until a few days before said deadline, which is why my writing is usually limited to 1200-1500 words.  Oh, I’ll compose in my head for days or weeks, but the actual task of writing doesn’t happen until that date-driven motivation pops up.

What I have a really hard time with is motivation around small personal or household tasks.  This drives Trish absolutely nuts.  Take a guess at how long I’ve been “promising” to organize the stacks of recipes I’ve been collecting?  Or organizing the shelves lining the wall beside our basement steps.  Or any number of little tasks around the house.  It’s not like I don’t have the time.  It’s not like I haven’t made a zillion lists (and I do love a list).  It’s not like I don’t get enormous satisfaction when I complete one of those tasks—when I take Trish on a tour through some little task I’ve completed, I’m like a child showing off an “A” on a class assignment.  I haven’t found the right intrinsic motivator yet for those things and I don’t think it would be good for our marriage if I asked Trish to be the source of extrinsic motivation.  I know that my activation barrier is around my paralyzing perfectionism.  I know that when I DO actually start something that I finish it to reasonable satisfaction.  But I just.  Can’t.  Get.  Myself.  To start.  It’s important to note, here, that Trish does not have this issue.  In fact, one could say she has the opposite problem.  When she gets a task into her head, she cannot sit still until it is done.  She will drive herself to exhaustion.  And there is usually an injury involved, a bandage or two, and some blood.  That is not my goal, either.  There must be some happy medium.

This had been an issue throughout my working life as well.  I’m sure my former co-workers who are reading this are rolling their eyes.  They could probably comment on the techniques they developed to motivate me to do things they needed me to do, be it a capital expenditure justification document or a conversation with someone or a phone call.  I probably should not let Trish know this, but I think what worked best was putting me in a position of personal and/or public embarrassment if I didn’t complete the task.

What’s super frustrating is that I know all the tricks.  I know that if there is something you are dreading that you should do that FIRST.  Get it out of the way.  I know that I do my best work of any kind in the morning hours—I’m writing now at 9:30 am.  I know that allowing myself some time to do something fun and/or mindless will absolutely keep me from ever tackling whatever it is that I want to motivate myself to do.  And I know that sometimes I just need to give myself a little grace and try again tomorrow.  No epiphanies, here.  No fancy wrap-up sentences that describe how I’ve tackled this issue.  Like most personal growth, it’s just going to be a forever journey, a daily battle.  What I can commit to is to keep trying to get better.  Writing about it like this will help me for a little bit.  I now, at least, feel a bit of public accountability over those recipes and those shelves.  I will NOT share with you what else is on that list!

I’m not sure which is tougher:  motivating yourself or motivating action in others.  I will tell you that I’ve found it a lot easier to motivate others within the structure and hierarchy of the work environment than in my personal life.  Incentives help sometimes.  Simply applying what works on you usually does not.  We’ll tackle that next time.

Coping Energy III

Yes, this is the third time that I’m writing about coping energy.  It’s been quite the humbling month, as evidenced by the fact that this essay is posting a week late, after the one before it was half a week late.  Anyone who knows me knows that I really don’t like missing deadlines or being late—even if no one but me cares.

Ever since I retired and then started this blog, I’ve been very proud of myself.  Thinking about all these life and leadership lessons as I’ve been writing about them had gotten me feeling something like a mountain climber summiting a peak.  The peak, in this case, is Maslow’s hierarchy and I guess I convinced myself that I had reached that rarified air of self-actualization.  At the tender age of 59 I had reached enlightenment and could now calmly pontificate from the top of the mountain and spread my wisdom.  My life was now a joyful string of days full of calm, happiness, rainbows, and unicorns.  Yeah, no.  My humbling lesson over this past month is that I have not reached some enviable skill of managing life’s stressors.  It’s that I had managed to remove a good number of the stressors I’d dealt with throughout my life through a combination of good fortune, retirement, and a life partner that I thank the Universe for every day.  And when a series of unforeseen and uncontrollable stressors came flooding back, I found that my ability to roll with the punches just wasn’t there.  So, we’re going to talk about coping energy AGAIN.

I just reread my first two essays on this topic.  You can find the first part here and the second part here.  I could have benefited from reading them these last few weeks.  What happened?  Well, it started on September 1st when the remains of Hurricane Ida, smashing up against a cold front, spawned a number of tornados in our area, including an EF2 that spun 130 mph winds right through our neighborhood.  RIGHT THROUGH.  That’s what my last essay was about.  The disruption was more than the power outage and the debris.  It was the constant irritation of the sound of the generators and chain saws and wood chippers.  It was the PTSD of going around the area and seeing everything changed.  It was the Y being closed and not wanting to do any other type of exercise and eating takeout and being thrown totally out of our routine.  It was trying to celebrate both of our birthdays and being happy and joyous but feeling exhausted the whole time while trying to hold it together.  It was navigating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in the middle of all that, which had me reliving all the horror, distress, and disorientation of those days.  All of this messed with my sleep, which is messed up enough as it is, and just aggravated the whole situation.  I had a hair trigger moodiness.  I was exhausted.  And I couldn’t really explain why I was feeling so off balance.

Then I had to get on a plane and fly to Atlanta for a family visit.  I love seeing my family!  What I dislike is the travel to Atlanta—on a good day.  This time, I had to deal with my stressed-out mood which meant a pit in my stomach every time I thought about any aspect of the trip.  Tropical Storm Nicholas had decided to park its tropical self west of Georgia, which meant a rainy forecast the whole time I was there.  That meant I was going to have to navigate “driving” around town in the rain—“driving” around Atlanta being some cross between the Indy 500 and a demolition derby.  To top it off, my sister’s car had taken in some water during a recent flash flood, so there was always the little concern in the back of my mind that something electrically kerflooey might happen at any point. 

There were other things going on, too, that I just don’t want to share.  The details are not important.  What matters is that I kept getting pinged by one stressor after another combined with a change in my schedule that kept me mentally and emotionally off balance for the first three weeks of the month without a break.  I did not handle it well.  Stuff that normally did not bother me much turned almost incapacitating!  I was teary all the time and had to keep going off by myself to let that emotion out.  I just wanted to sleep all the time, but I couldn’t sleep at night.  I wasn’t exercising.  I ate Very Bad Food and lots of it, which also left me feeling lethargic.  I slid very far, very fast.  I had no coping energy and was not able to regain any reasonable amount until these last few days.  That humbled me big time.

I thought I had conquered the coping energy challenge!  I thought I had developed the skills to catch myself, to maintain perspective, to practice effective self-care, and keep my coping energy reserves full (or at least not totally empty).  Instead, I found myself back in those old patterns of short temper, thinking only about myself and my own needs, making poor choices, and just feeling like I was drowning.  I disappointed myself and that made everything worse.  I felt like a failure.

Trish, members of my family, and friends who have seen me during this time were all kind of puzzled by this behavior.  It just didn’t seem that bad to them.  None of the stressors by themselves were enough to knock me off kilter.  Driving around Atlanta is never fun but I used to be able to do it without feeling like I was going to throw up when I got behind the wheel.  It was the combination and the unrelenting barrage—sort of like a boxer weakened by blow after blow.  He could withstand any individual hit just fine, but after so many so quickly, he went down for the count.

So, here’s what I’ve learned though all of this.  When someone tells you about things that are stressing them and sapping their coping energy, don’t try to fix it.  If they want your suggestions for solutions, they will ask you.  What they want is for you to listen, to really hear them, to validate that the situation sucks, and to know that you care.  Look, I’m a problem solver.  Most of us are.  We’ve spent our careers doing that and it’s hard to resist the urge to fix something or someone.  I’m telling you, resist that urge!  I did not want all the well-meaning suggestions that came flooding in.  I knew I could right the ship.  I just needed to vent about the storm and hear from others that, yeah, the storm is rough.  I am reasonably good at asking for what I need, although sometimes I need to reach a breaking point and that ask comes with tears.  (Very effective for getting what you need, by the way.)  Others may indeed need a little prodding, but ask gently.  Ultimately, if the person feels safe and supported, they WILL ask for what they need.  And if you are the one struggling, let yourself struggle a bit and then take one little step forward.  Don’t beat yourself up but don’t get stuck.  And ask.  For.  Help.  Just having Trish take me to the airport instead of driving myself made a world of difference.

I’m mostly out of the storm, now, as evidenced by the fact that I can write about it.  A visit from a dear friend helped to fill me back up.  The bathroom scale has fortunately not moved appreciably and my eating is reverting to the mean.  I’m still looking forward to getting back into regular exercise.  I’m going to work on the hubris.  I’m not invincible.  I don’t have all the perfect techniques to avoid a crash.  I learn a little more each time I go through a difficult period, which is why the difficult times are so important.  This time, I am reminded of the importance of pushing myself outside of my comfort zone a little more frequently so that I am better able to handle unexpected upsets more easily.  And I will work even harder to have that compassion for others whose coping energy is sapped for whatever reason.  “We are here to get it right, not be right.”

Prayers and Chainsaws

This essay is posting a few days late and you’ll understand why when you read it.  My last essay, When Plans Change, was an unintended precursor to this one.  Last time, I wrote about rolling with the punches when someone else gets punched.  That essay was about compassion and empathy.  This time, I’m going to talk about when you get punched yourself.  It’s an essay about resilience, gratitude, and so many of the topics I keep writing about.  Life sure tries to teach you the same lessons over and over again.  And what’s my mantra?  All together now:  We’re here to GET it right, not to BE right.

Our story begins last Wednesday, almost a week ago, when I was still noodling on what I wanted to write about for this essay.  I still have that more humorous one buzzing around in my head and I WILL get to it, but for some reason it just didn’t feel right.  We were anticipating the residue of Hurricane Ida coming through that afternoon and I was thinking about the impact that 3-5 inches of rain might have.  “Don’t forget to check the sump pump,” I thought, “to make sure it’s not cockeyed and won’t kick on.”  I was thinking about the potential of losing power and maybe not being able to make my biweekly Zoom call with my college friends.  I was thinking about cooking dinner.  I was NOT thinking about a tornado.

The TV was off around 5:00 because I was just reading and Trish had gone upstairs to take a nap.  My BFF, who lives a half hour south and east of us, texted that they were under a tornado warning and were heading downstairs.  Now, tornados are NOT common in this corner of southeastern PA.  We’d had a surprisingly strong one just a few weeks before and some straight-line winds that did damage the week before that.  But tornados are just not a thing here.  I turned on the news and started cooking dinner.  I saw that the “cone of danger” emanating from Beth’s warning was heading in our direction.  I chopped potatoes and put them in the oven to roast.  In minutes, my phone went off with a warning of our own.  I honestly wasn’t worried, but I’m a person who follows directions.  I turned off the oven, went upstairs, woke Trish up, we grabbed the cats and my iPad and headed to the basement—only the second time in the five years I’ve lived here.  Bridget was upset to be separated from her food bowl.  It was raining fairly hard, as expected, but we still had power so I started streaming the news.  Two meteorologists were tag teaming at this point since there were three of four warnings at once.  Very unusual.  Then, they both gasped and pointed to a slowly moving white feature on the radar.  That, they said, was a debris field.  This was now a confirmed tornado.  And guess which warning that was associated with?  Then, for dramatic effect, the power went out.  We looked up at the small basement window.  We could see absolutely nothing.  Just sheets of water and an occasional glimpse of trees swaying like paper caught in a fan.  We were barely breathing.  After a couple of minutes the power flickered back on, to our amazement, and we watched the radar with Adam and Cecily (the meteorologists) until the storm was past us.  Then wandered upstairs.  We didn’t see any daylight above us when we opened the basement door, thank goodness.  The rain had slowed to a drizzle.  Trish went outside as the neighbors all gathered.  I, like the conductor of the band on the Titanic, finished cooking dinner.  I didn’t know what else to do!  We never ate it.

Trish came back in and told me to come outside.  The first thing I noticed was the massive branch from the neighbors’ tree lying in our driveway, right where Trish normally parked.  For some reason, she had been driven to pull her car back to the end of the driveway before the storm, wanting the rain to clean mud out of her spot.  Her car would have been totaled.  Then I looked across the street.  The large, dense tree line behind our neighbors’ houses was gone.  Just gone.  I could see sheared off trunks peeking out a few feet above the roof line, like someone had taken a pair of scissors and snipped them off.  The trunks were just bare.  Ripped of all foliage.  The street was flooded.  Some neighbors lost siding or had other damage from flying debris.  Everyone was just milling about; some were collecting garbage cans flung a couple hundred yards away.  I was stunned but had no idea the extent of the damage.  The rain came back so we headed inside.  I don’t remember turning the TV on.  No one really knew the extent of the damage then, anyway.  I started the call with my college friends and the power went off promptly at 9:00.  Trish and I worked from 9:00 pm until 3:00 am bailing out our sump well to keep the basement from flooding.  Eight inches of rain puts a bit of hydrostatic pressure on a foundation!

Many of you reading this know what happened.  An EF2 tornado with 130 mph winds ripped through our neighborhood.  The tree damage I saw when I first poked my head outside was repeated across a path that stretched several miles.  At some points the tornado bounced down and took out some roofs.  It had a particular appetite for power line poles.  And the trees!  So many big, old trees ripped out of the ground or sheared off and stripped!  Trees across roads.  Trees into houses.  Skeletons of trees standing alone in what used to be solid wooded areas.

After a restless three hours of sleep, we awoke to a beautiful day.  Why is it always a beautiful day after a horrific storm?  Is there just nothing left in the atmosphere or is it a way of giving hope?  The first thing I noticed was the drone of the generators.  I like some white noise, but there was something about those generators that was like nails on a chalkboard to me.  It grated on your nerves like a tooth ache.  That was quickly drowned out by the chainsaws and wood chippers.  The streets were filled with crews, dozens of them.  Our power was only out for two days but it felt like forever.  We were so fortunate.  No damage to the house.  Minimal tree and limb loss.  We spent most of the day helping neighbors and walking around.  Everything looks different.  I have this vision of my guardian angels (Dad, Grandma, Trish’s parents) lifting that funnel cloud up and keeping it above the roof line for us and Trish’s two sisters (we all live in a line that defined the tornado’s path).

The disruption wasn’t so much the power loss or even the road closures.  Trying to get out of the ‘hood was like figuring out the Hogwarts staircases—every time you went somewhere, different roads were shut in different spots as they first cleared the roads, then pulled out enough of the downed trees to assess the utility damage, and then fixed the damage.  These guys are freaking heroes.  All I could think of, though, was that feeling of powerlessness, of being totally at the mercy of Mother Nature.  I also thought about the earth’s power of renewal and how all those stripped wooded areas would lead to new growth, new habitat.  Even the deer are thrilled at all the yummy leaves now within reach!  But us humans, we are fighting entropy to put things back the way we like it, the way we need it, as quickly as possible.  It feels futile and comforting at the same time. 

As I write these words, it is the first day of Rosh Hashanah—a time of introspection and assessment.  Fitting that life has given us this reality check.  It sounds trivial to relate this, but I think about how I felt that first morning.  We had no power; the roads were blocked; I wasn’t clear headed enough to realize that we could still use our gas stove and that we still had water.  I just thought, “I can’t eat breakfast.”  I was panicked for just a minute wondering where my next meal was coming from!  It’s been a long, long time since I’ve found myself on that bottom level of Maslow’s hierarchy, worrying about basic safety and needs.  I’ve been so busy anguishing over those upper levels of the pyramid, with not enough gratitude about not needing to worry about those lower foundational levels; not enough compassion for those who do.  Trish and I are still mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted, sentiments echoed in the eyes of our neighbors.  We know we skirted a disaster and so many others were not so fortunate.  I’m still serenaded by the sounds of wood chippers and the roads are still clogged with repairmen, but I’m feeling normal enough to write.  “Prayers and chainsaws” said the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer; gratitude and resilience.

When Plans Change

This is an essay about empathy, compassion, and roasting vegetables.  I had been working up a funny essay for this weekend, but my plans have changed.  Oh, I still intend to write the lighthearted one, probably next week, but oftentimes life just whispers what needs to be said.  Something happens and I just start noodling on it and then I start discussing it with Trish and then, well, I have to write it down to get it out of my head. Buckle up, reader, because this is going to be a deeply personal essay.  Then again, most of my essays are.  A by-product of embracing authenticity and vulnerability is that I just don’t know how to write any other way anymore.  I know I am not discovering new deep thoughts or breaking new philosophical ground.  Writing helps me work things out and by sharing this writing, I hope that I can help you put words to similar thoughts that have been swirling in your head.

Last time, I wrote about intentionality—choosing to act consciously and on things that I decide are important to me.  I wrote that Trish and I are both struggling to differing degrees with a sense of purpose these days and that embracing intentionality has helped me find meaning in things that used to be somewhat mindless activities.  That’s all well and good but I knew there was more.  The “more” has really come out over these last couple of weeks as I’ve worked to put “intentionality” into conscious practice.  As I wrote last time, I’ve started taking a couple of minutes in the morning to write a few lines in my journal to “set my intention” for the day.  I put that statement in quotes because it really does sound like loosey-goosey, crunchy-granola-spirituality that cries out for quote marks.  But it actually works.  Until it doesn’t.  It’s the “until it doesn’t” part—when your plans change—that I want to write about today.

I’ll start with a simple example.  One night last week, Trish and I sat down after dinner to watch the evening news, to be followed by my nightly call to my Mom.  Then I got a text from a friend.  She lives a few hours away and her son had recently moved to the area to start his first post-college job.  She was asking me if there was a pharmacy that delivered because her son had a terrible migraine and didn’t have any medicine.  I could have ignored the text.  Or I could have given her the number of the local CVS.  And I am embarrassed to admit that not too many years ago I would have chosen one of those paths.  Instead, I did a quick mental calculation.  The nightly news bums me out anyway and I could afford to skip a night; I could text Mom and tell her I’d call a few minutes late; and he lives five minutes from my house.  When I added into the calculation a few seconds of imagining being a Mom, several hours away from my son who was in pain, feeling helpless and wanting to help my child…well, it became a no-brainer.  I hopped in the car and brought the kid some Excedrin Migraine.  And a chocolate bar. 

I’ve often heard the advice that if you are feeling down or sad, go do something for someone else.  For most of my adult life I had not been able to embrace that because, honestly, I was just too self-centered.  But, man, is it true!  I felt so good after running that errand!  And I realized what a gift my friend had given ME by giving me the opportunity to help her son out.  I’ve beaten myself up regularly over the years because I’ve felt like I did not give back enough to the community.  I wrote checks, which certainly were needed, but I hadn’t given much of my time.  I’m not sure what made me so hesitant to volunteer.  Maybe it was reluctance to making an open-ended commitment, since I tended to go for one-off “day of caring” events.  Maybe it was fear of an emotional commitment—either making one myself or feeling compelled to make one by someone else’s needs.  This has torn at me for decades.  I tried to assuage the need and the guilt by writing bigger checks but even giving away my whole net worth wouldn’t have been enough.  I wanted the feeling of doing good without having to put in any effort.  I still don’t know from what I was protecting myself.  It was really only when I wrote that last essay that I realized, to paraphrase myself, that I was looking for meaning EVERYWHERE without realizing I could find meaning ANYWHERE.

Part of that realization was opening my eyes to what Trish and her posse of friends have brought into my life.  Every one of them, but especially Trish, has shown me the value of doing something that makes someone else’s life a little easier.  Trish seems to always go that little extra step to do something nice for someone.  She isn’t afraid of the effort; she isn’t protective of her vulnerability.  My bestie, Beth, is the same way.  They are both very aware of the needs and preferences of those around them and look for ways, large and small, to address those needs.  Little by little, I’ve started putting that into action myself.  Seriously, Sherri, you never were aware of that before?  Well, yes and no.  During my working years, especially, I just ping-ponged from one reactionary activity to another.  I rarely stopped and asked myself, “What (and who) is really important here?”   While I have always had a strong sense of empathy, it tended to just make me anxious and sad for others.  Or angry.  What it rarely did was inspire action on my part, as it does for Trish and Beth.

So, this week there was another change in plans.  One of our best friends is the only child of a really feisty 95-year-old woman, whom we all adore.  She has continued to insist on living alone with only help from her daughter.  Earlier this week, our greatest fear was realized when she fell at night and wasn’t found until the morning, her hip broken.  The wagons have quickly circled and when the posse says, “We’ll be there” you can take it to the bank.  Today, Trish and I were asked to go to her Mom’s house and gather up trash for garbage day tomorrow and take care of a few other tasks.  There was no question, no hesitation, just asking ourselves, “What else can we do?”  Since my love language is cooking, I immediately went to the grocery store and roasted a tray of vegetables and grilled some chicken breasts.  Our friend needs healthy food when she gets home at night from the hospital!  We looked around her Mom’s house and did everything we could think of that would help.  No matter what happens next, the posse will be there.  Not out of obligation.  Out of empathy, compassion, and love.

I realize that I am much more aware of little things that will make life easier for people around me.  Sure, I try to do lots of little things for Trish, as she does for me.  But I also pulled our trash cans out from the curb this morning because it would be hard for the trash truck to get around the vehicle parked there and I didn’t want the guys to have to get out of the truck.  And I hold the door for people at the Y.  And I ask if I can cook when I go visit people.  (OK, I’m still a little unsure about my cooking but I’m going to trust that Trish would tell me if it’s not really that good.)  I don’t do these things out of obligation or because I expect something in return from them.  I do it simply because I have made the conscious decision that doing these things is important to me.  And it just feels good to do something nice for someone, especially when they don’t expect it.  All this sounds so obvious as I write it, but this has truly been revelatory for me.  Oh, I still write checks to charities that can reach many more people.  But the real meaning for me comes from those acts that I choose to do for those I care about, or who just cross my path. It’s been conscious.  Purposeful.  And it has meaning.  Even when—or especially when—it requires a sudden change in plans.