Every other book...

I'm afraid of taking steps that are not on the map, 

but by taking those steps despite my fears, 

I have a much more interesting life.

- Paulo Coelho

Lisa and I had known each other for quite a few years.  We had met when I was in graduate school.  Subsequent to that, we joined the same church and saw each other several times a week for nearly three decades.  We played in the church band together – she a piano player…me rhythm guitar player – rhythm guitar…a euphemism for mediocre play. 

“I thought you might enjoy this book,” she said handing me a copy of Colin Powell’s autobiography.  I smiled and said with little attempt to hide the shallowness of my intellectual curiosity, “I really don’t read non-fiction.  You know, the ending is not a surprise.”

“Well,” she continued as if I had said nothing, “I think you would like it anyway.”  With a faint smile I took the book, knowing because I saw her regularly, I would be reading this book!

I have enjoyed reading most of my life, but up to that time, spent most of my time in fiction.  Outside of the scripture and my professional reading, I had greatly enjoyed Michael Connolly, Pat Conroy, Lee Childs, Danial Silva, and Ken Follett, among a fair number of other writers.  Mysteries and broad-brush stories of life, heroic battles against all odds, and love drew my attention.

Lisa’s recommendation turned out to be a surprisingly good, and much more entertaining than I had anticipated.  This book would alter my life.  Actually, it wasn’t the book.  It was the decision following the book that changed everything.

A tiny course change…

Powell’s book seemed enjoyable enough that I thought, “What if every other book I read for the next year is one I wouldn’t read under any circumstance?”  For surely, left to my own devices, I would not have read this one.  I’m not exactly sure how the idea emerged, but I figured with the demands of life, one year of alternating books like this couldn’t be that painful!

At first this new rhythm was awkward.  The initial book was the Lord Russell's, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, probably not the best first pick for length, but it turned out to be a real page-turner.  How Eichmann was eventually tracked down and captured in Brazil was as good as any spy novel I had read.  My incentive, however, was to get through the book so I could reward myself with my normal fare.

That first year went by out of shear discipline and duty.  I haven’t always kept my resolutions, but for some reason I slogged through the tall grass for the next 12 months. 

As the year ended, the friction of reading new things didn’t seem so bad, and I had, in fact, actually enjoyed a couple of the books.  I thought, maybe I would see if I could do it for another year.

Year two…

During the ‘…second year of planting…’ an interesting thing began to happen.  I found myself pushing my way through the novels a little more quickly, in anticipation of the landscape of the ‘…next unknown...’ world to be revealed.  The criterion for choosing each book was simple.  I would wander over to the nonfiction section of the library and glance at the titles, thinking to myself, “Who would read this kind of book?”  Over time, I found that more and more I was standing in front of history and philosophy, with a biography or two along the way.

In the years since that small decision everything has changed about the way I read and the things I am interested in.  Over that time, I have been unable to finish only three or four books I had chosen.  The first unfinished title was Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter.  I picked it from a best seller’s list, and gave it a pretty heroic effort, but some 200 pages in; I just could not bring myself to read any more.  I found the same thing in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.  I felt badly that I couldn’t ‘get them,’ but I just didn’t have what it took to finish them up…failure with Gatsby a particular disappointment, because it was considered an American classic by one of this country’s most celebrated writers.

Over the years nothing is the same. New, and formerly completely unknown, worlds have opened up.  I have found ‘friends’ from bygone eras who were so able to express the thoughts and feelings I had, but could not put into words.  I have traveled the seas, poked through jungles, and felt the fears as well as joys of men and women so able to paint canvases in brilliant and subtle shades of color.  I have found the kinds of writers that resonate with my soul like the harmonics of a cosmic harp in the universe, that when plucked, vibrate and touch my heart as if the author were in the room whispering intimately in my ear.

I have come to appreciate most everything I thought to be unique has happened again and again and again and again.  The intrigue, the political debate and vilification of one’s opponent, the love, the fidelity, the betrayal – whether today or in Empires past…it's all the same. 

Solomon was right, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).  I have, however, come to appreciate purchasing tickets to become a ‘peeping Tom’ into the minds of thoughtful people has expanded almost everything about the way I think…maybe with foresight, minimize at least the mistakes of the past.

I would like to be able to say, this part of my life’s journey was the result of a deliberate effort to increase the quality of my life.  I would like to say that I had a burning and unquenchable intellectual curiosity.  I would like to say that I am insightful and take the broader view of things.  All of that, of course, would be utter nonsense!  My life perceptions changed because I didn’t want to disappoint my friend Lisa…it was by accident, and I might add, in retrospect, a happy accident indeed.

Wrapping around the edges…

In the end, it’s the one degree of change that makes the difference isn’t it?  You know how the story goes…two boats begin a journey together, with their courses just one degree different.  In the early going, it appears they are heading in the same direction, but over time, they drift further and further apart until eventually, they are completely out of sight of one another.   It was a one-degree of difference in my life, in this particular circumstance, which put this part of the trajectory of my life completely out of view from where it was headed.

This small course shift seemed to be nothing more than a minor adjustment in my peripheral vision.  I haven’t seen Lisa now for some time.  Life and circumstance has changed all of that.  However, every time I pick up another spyglass that allows me to peek into the mind of those men and women who have labored to share their thoughts and ideas with me, I think of her.

The next time you find yourself looking for a good read, why not try something YOU would never read under any circumstance...

Thanks Lisa…

- ted

Life and its moments...

Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part,

and of what administrator of the universe thy existence

is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee,

which if thou dost not use for clearing away the

clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou

wilt go, and it will never return.

- Marcus Aurelius: 

Meditations

We were drinking coffee and chatting as we try to do once a week before the workday begins.  For a year or more it was Wednesday, but for the past few months, it has been Thursday’s at 7AM.  There usually is no agenda, no specific topic…Bill and I just chat about whatever flows through the liquid chemistry of our minds. 

One week, it’s predominantly a listening time for me…another week; I might do more of the chatting.  No matter how the conversation goes, it is a dialogue, a give and take.  There is a conscious sense this ‘early morning coffee’ break has little to do with the coffee…in many ways, it is transcendent from the topics we share.  I think that’s what happens with friends…you know, the unspoken so much more that what is said.

Bill is a physician, and a specialist in the management of chronic pain.  Our common professional interest is persistent back and neck pain.  We quietly chat about business…families…a little politics, and frequently “…life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness…” 

Pursuit, now there is a word.  It suggests the journey, not the final accomplishment…it suggests, in some ways, we have a sense for the ride, whatever it might be, but are a little unclear what the destination might be… after all, what is “…it all about Alfie?”  We smile about that…

The topics...

This week I chatted with him about one of the paradoxes of passing the Medicare barrier – something, by the way, he experienced a fair number of years ago.

I was excited because I now qualified for the ‘Silver Sneaker’ program, one of the benefits of my newly acquired Medicare Plus status.  In particular, one of the perks is a paid membership in any one of 20 or so fitness centers in the San Diego area. 

While for me an exciting opportunity, for those Medicare accountants, it is a small price to pay if they can keep me out of the doctor’s office and away from expensive medical treatments. 

The paradox? Sixty-five seems a bit late to provide this kind of service, because certain health/illness barriers have already been passed by millions of folk.  It would seem the smart money would start programs like this when people were in their forties.  It is a strange system…we buy insurance, betting we are going to be sick and Insurance Company’s sell it, betting we’re not! I digress…I LOVE THIS PROGRAM!!

Bill talked a little about his week and an impending surgery his wife was facing, I talked about work and a weekend I had spent in Truckee, California.  The topics weren’t really important…the care and protection we feel in these brief moments of human connection are what we have come to appreciate in one another.

Human connection – small talk.  I mentioned Molly and I had been to the movies on the weekend.  We were watching the previews, when totally unexpectedly, there was a promo for Les Miserables, to be released in December.  I grew up in a musical home, but it was, to put it politely, an economically austere home.  We loved to listen to musicals on the record player, but often listened to studio recordings because we couldn’t afford the original cast albums.

Over the years, I have attended musical theater as often as I could…Les Miserables, one of the most compelling and moving theatrical experiences of my life.  This love for theater was shared by my sister Nancy.

The plaintiff and heart wrenching song accompanied the movie trailer, “I dreamed a dream…” – the stinging words of hope and a life lost…through the backdrop Victor Hugo’s epic story of a better world to come.  Nancy and I loved this show, and with the quickness of an unexpected lightening strike to the heart, I was instantly transported to a private world of images of the life my sister led and moments we had shared.  While the silver screen played, a different and richer movie unfolded in my heart as unnoticed tears streamed down my face.  The preview ended, and as suddenly as I had slipped away, I returned wiping the now discerned tears from eyes.

Suddenly, the water deepened...

Bill and I were just about done with our coffee when I mentioned this experience.  I expressed that as life has moved on, I have lost a number of people who were meaningful in my life.  My mother and dad, some friends and mentors, but that it seemed to me the loss of my sister was different. 

In trying to find the words for the indescribable, I said, “There was a thread of continuity with her that was rich and deep.”  It was not that I did not, nor that I don’t mourn the loss of my parents, but in many ways, I really didn’t know them in the way I knew her…they were; well…they were…parents – some barriers un-crossable. 

I grieve the loss of friends and mentors who deeply touched my life, and yet there wasn’t the familiarity, the incidental hours, the unexpected moments of a freely lived life that I shared with my sister.

Bill then began to tell me of a friend that he had from a child and how he had a ‘thread’ with him.  It seemed this word had found a different meaning for us…a way, at least in our communications that brought a small degree of deeper understanding from which had emerged a common recognition – or at least as common a perception as two people can find.

In the give and take of our conversation about these two people in our lives, a distant gaze filled our eyes as the movie trailers of these two very special people played full tilt.  We had, over coffee, given one another permission to feel and express and share – as much as two people can – a private world through a collective experience. 

As we dipped in and out of the private worlds we had entered, we acknowledged a sense of longing…a hunger, neither for life nor experience passed, but for what was yet to come, or at least what we desired to come.

The point...

It is these small and unguarded moments in life that make the journey worth the effort.  With all of the distractions that fill our days…all of the places to go, people to meet…all the books to read, films to see, music to listen to…there is something infinitely more meaningful.  It is those quiet and small moments of the human heart, the ones that come so unexpectedly over early morning coffee.

- ted

Speed can slow you down...

“The faster I go, the behinder I get.”

- Lewis Carroll

We were wandering home after the movie, and had taken one of the side roads to avoid the Interstate.  As I looked in my rearview mirror, there was a woman driving a late model Mazda tailing me closely enough that it might have warranted a dinner invitation, had we been able to speak.  I politely tapped my brakes to let her know I wasn’t sure we knew each other quite well enough to be…how should I put it politely…nearly so intimate with one another.

The last section of this bypass is four-lane, so as soon as we got to that point, she zoomed by me, giving me ‘the look.’  Off she went like the rabbit in Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare, and slipped out of site.  I was thinking as she went by, “go for it lady.”

Justice for the tortoise came as a result of the hare’s belief the turtle was no competition. But the tortoise just kept plodding along, and as the story goes, crossed the finish line first!  The moral?  Well there are a couple of them. 

Tortoise: When in the arena, stay in there, don’t give up, keep at it, and be steady. 

Hare: No matter what one thinks of their skill set, one must ‘be’ and ‘stay’ in the arena.  Confidence, dare I say overconfidence, must be matched with action.

Justice in my case came a little more quickly in the form of a stoplight.  Rounding the corner, there she was waiting at a red light.  As I pulled up behind her, I snuggled my car close to the back of hers.  She glanced up.  She had blown by me because she was in a hurry, but here we were, together at the stoplight…ah, the stoplight…the great equalizer.  We shared a brief ‘rear view mirror’ moment, smiled – both ‘getting it’ – and as the light turned green went on with our day.  Okay, I did feel a little satisfaction – this time.  I smiled again reminding myself how often I had been the one in a hurry, only to find myself sharing the stoplight with the person I had passed.

It doesn’t take much happening around me to get small take-aways from events in my life.  Hurrying up, doesn’t always get one there faster, and taking one’s time doesn’t always make one late.  I was reminded Lewis Carroll’s great lines in Through the Looking Glass.  Alice had been running with the Queen, and when she stopped, noticed she was in the same place as where she started:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." 

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Then I thought about the unavoidable BIG STOPLIGHT at the end of our journey, and all the little stoplights of life along the way.  I thought about how it is we occupy ourselves and how, in the moment, we feel things to be so important, that we must ‘get there quickly.’  AND yet, in the end, we will find ourselves at the same intersection.  That caused me to smile a little too.

It’s how we live our lives that counts.  If we hurry, hurry, hurry, we run the risk of missing a lot along the way.  If we do nothing, we run the risk of, well…doing nothing.

Getting older has its benefits and liabilities.  The benefit is a richer understanding of the importance of appreciating small moments and finding meaning in them.  The liability, at least for me, is that it has taken many years to find the proper pace.  

“Youth wasted on the young?”  Maybe…but then again, letting those speeders slip by while focusing on the things that are important to us…is key.  Let them go, because, an energetic push to ‘get there’ frequently keeps one from appreciating the journey.  You know, "...it's not the destination, but the..."

The trick in life?  Finding the proper speed!

- ted

Being present...

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

Now is the time to understand more,

so that we may fear less.”

- Marie Curie

I have this friend in Ottawa, Canada.  Friend might be understating the situation; I have known this woman, well let me see…I have known this woman all of my life!  It is conceivable (pun fully intended), in some ways, I knew her vicariously whilst we were carried in our respective mothers’ wombs…they were friends.  Folklore suggests maybe we communicated before birth to switch our arrival to the planet…me arriving on her expected birthdate; she on mine.  Yep, we have known each other, I suppose as long as two non-siblings might.

A few years ago, my friend shared a piece of wisdom she had picked up along the way, “Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift.  That’s why we call it ‘The Present.’”  It was in response to something I had written in a moment of unresolvable reflection.  You know, the kinds of things you think about that just ‘are’…things you really don’t fathom…the unknowns of life you feel driven to understand, but lie just outside your grasp…just beyond the horizon of comprehension.  I do spend a fair amount of time considering these sorts of things.  She, in the not so subtle way that only good friends can do, was suggesting I should lighten up and appreciate the moment…

The present, hmmm…

I’m not the quickest study, so I gestated this comment for a few years – a little at a time as it were, and began to think about the word ‘present,’ and it’s different meanings.

For example:

Present

(noun)

A period of time now occurring…immediately

between the past and future...

Present

(noun)

Something you receive…like my friend suggesting

my life in the moment was a gift – a present...

Present

(adjective)

In attendance for

school or church or a meeting...

Present

(prē-sent, verb)

The act of giving

a gift to someone...

I can actually hear my friend’s voice chuckling that I have taken her “Let me brighten up your day” comment and given it more thought than simply “…enjoy the moment will you??”  Knowing me as she does, however, she might appreciate this would not be quite enough for me. 

She would, of course, be correct.  It is important to be in the moment, smell the flowers, the coffee, bathe in the ‘what is’… I mean, what could be more meaningful – right?

Meaningful…yes, but for the moment to be meaningful, should it not be …full of meaning…?  You know, context – the what…the why.  These are the things that draw me to edge of my envelope…the edge of my known world…the edge of my map.

There be dragons…

When early English mapmakers came to edges of their known world, they would write in the margins “Here be dragons…” The ‘dragons’ represented unknown areas of the earth – the dangers of territories unexplored.  As more and more of the world’s geography became known, the ‘dragons’ diminished until modern mapmakers no longer have dragons - knowledge and understanding slayed them.  Slaying them, however, required exploration…asking the questions…pushing the envelope.  When we consider things beyond the confines of our known world and universe – for us still… there “…be dragons.”

One might argue there are many things in our lives that remain ‘…territories unexplored…’ – our ‘dragons.’  In the rhythm of the universe, they are the things we don’t understand in the moment (present), the things just beyond our grasp, things we continually seek.  Yet, like the makers of maps, as we gain knowledge and understanding, the ‘dragons’ slip away like the morning mist when the sun climbs its latticework to brighten yet another day.

Where were we…

Let me see…we were talking about being in the moment…life as it comes.  Being in a place to appreciate things as they appear in front of us – expected or unexpected…the gifts of life as it were.  There is little doubt thinking about how the things fit into a bigger picture can detract from fully enjoying an occasion or experience.  On the other hand, the “…be here now…” life can leave one with little time to process things or plan for coming events.

I think my friend was simply wanting to help me appreciate life should be balanced.  The ‘now’ for the simple enjoyment of ‘now,’ and the ‘now’ for the preparation of ‘then.’  You know…now and then…

Is there a take away here?  Yes, probably life should be balanced in a way that brings a sense of appreciation for the moment…for the way each moment fits into the symphony of life, like the intricate combination of notes on a keyboard, interacting to elevate and thrill the soul.  It is the exercise of those notes, however, that bring about the next and yet unknown musical creation.

Staying merely in the moment, or focusing solely on the context of life can easily create disparities that are probably not healthy on either end of the scale.  Balancing the moment and the horizon brings a sense of meaning.

The point…

Being present, isn't simply a matter of showing up and getting into the moment.  The present is the accumulation of past experience and preparation for what may happen next.  Truly one can only act in the present, but being thoughtfully present can make all the variations of 'present' more meaningful.

While not as clever as my friend's comment to me, I think this probably fits the bill:

“Be in the moment (present)…striving to be attendant (present) to life as it happens…and appreciate the gifts (presents) as they are given (presented).”

I’ll try not to overthink this…

- ted