Man of the People, Thwarter of Evildoers, Butler to Cats.
There was a photo of the testing class for our recent first-ever escrima rankings, placed on the dojo’s Web site, which I am reproducing here. I am, obviously, the one wearing the green belt. The tall one in the center is Sensei Chris, the escrima instructor and one of the Uechi black belts.
My friend Duane blogged today about conversations. Instead of summarizing his argument, I’ll merely link to it. Read it before reading on, please.
No, really. READ IT.
OK, good. Let’s continue.
I recall, late last fall, visiting an elderly gentleman in the hospital. I was making my normal pastoral-care rounds, and stopped by his room to provide him with Communion and perhaps some spiritual counseling. The gentleman’s condition wasn’t life-threatening, and he was looking forward to his discharge a day or two hence.
Normally, these visits are routine affairs; you stop in for a moment, and then you go. Every now and then, a visit extends for upwards of an hour — usually because the patient has needs that require addressing.
This fellow took about 45 minutes of my time. I think, fundamentally, he was just lonely. As I recall, he was well into his 80s, and his remaining family was out of the state. He didn’t have many people to talk to, so whenever someone would listen, he’d tell his story.
And tell stories, he did. Fascinating ones. He was a veteran of WW2, Korea, and Vietnam — first in the Army Air Corps/USAF, and then in the U.S. Navy, mostly as a pilot. He grew up in Grand Rapids and came of age during the Great Depression; he told us how his family would grow cucumbers, pickle them, and sell the pickles for pennies a jar to immigrant families along the city’s southern industrial belt. The amusing anecdotes of living in an apartment building with several other families — the building had a single, shared washroom — were priceless. He told me about his mother driving the family’s first car into the living room because she forgot how to work the clutch, and how difficult it was in a social sense to adjust to life with indoor plumbing, electricity, telephones, and even television.
Some of the stories were sad. His father, who had been severely wounded in combat during the Great War, lost a son; the boy saw his father take pills (for his wounds) and decided to do what daddy did. And my gentle storyteller’s own son had a birth defect that required serious and constant attention before the boy eventually died.
Most interesting from his stories was the perspective that came through. A cynic might call it fatalism, but I think it is more a generational understanding — perhaps lost in our own day — that people are fundamentally responsible for themselves. Not a lot of self-pity, and a warm embrace of the fond times without going insane about the bad, but certainly a strong sense of personal responsibility.
As I read Duane’s post, it occurred to me that one of the joys of listening to my old patient was that I didn’t need to reply. I didn’t have to answer or rebut or even trade a story of my own. I could focus solely on listening, and I enjoyed that.
Duane is right that we (myself included) tend to listen only insofar as to cue up the next thing to spew from betwixt our lips. He’s also right that this presents a barrier to meaningful two-way conversation.
But I wonder: Is part of the problem that we no longer feel a need to listen without speaking? Is storytelling — in the wizened chief enthralling the tribe by the campfire vein — vanishing from our cultural landscape?
Perhaps we’d all do a bit better if, every now and then, we sat down with our elders and focused only on their stories. Even if it’s at McDonalds.
My friend Duane blogged today about conversations. Instead of summarizing his argument, I’ll merely link to it. Read it before reading on, please.
No, really. READ IT.
OK, good. Let’s continue.
I recall, late last fall, visiting an elderly gentleman in the hospital. I was making my normal pastoral-care rounds, and stopped by his room to provide him with Communion and perhaps some spiritual counseling. The gentleman’s condition wasn’t life-threatening, and he was looking forward to his discharge a day or two hence.
Normally, these visits are routine affairs; you stop in for a moment, and then you go. Every now and then, a visit extends for upwards of an hour — usually because the patient has needs that require addressing.
This fellow took about 45 minutes of my time. I think, fundamentally, he was just lonely. As I recall, he was well into his 80s, and his remaining family was out of the state. He didn’t have many people to talk to, so whenever someone would listen, he’d tell his story.
And tell stories, he did. Fascinating ones. He was a veteran of WW2, Korea, and Vietnam — first in the Army Air Corps/USAF, and then in the U.S. Navy, mostly as a pilot. He grew up in Grand Rapids and came of age during the Great Depression; he told us how his family would grow cucumbers, pickle them, and sell the pickles for pennies a jar to immigrant families along the city’s southern industrial belt. The amusing anecdotes of living in an apartment building with several other families — the building had a single, shared washroom — were priceless. He told me about his mother driving the family’s first car into the living room because she forgot how to work the clutch, and how difficult it was in a social sense to adjust to life with indoor plumbing, electricity, telephones, and even television.
Some of the stories were sad. His father, who had been severely wounded in combat during the Great War, lost a son; the boy saw his father take pills (for his wounds) and decided to do what daddy did. And my gentle storyteller’s own son had a birth defect that required serious and constant attention before the boy eventually died.
Most interesting from his stories was the perspective that came through. A cynic might call it fatalism, but I think it is more a generational understanding — perhaps lost in our own day — that people are fundamentally responsible for themselves. Not a lot of self-pity, and a warm embrace of the fond times without going insane about the bad, but certainly a strong sense of personal responsibility.
As I read Duane’s post, it occurred to me that one of the joys of listening to my old patient was that I didn’t need to reply. I didn’t have to answer or rebut or even trade a story of my own. I could focus solely on listening, and I enjoyed that.
Duane is right that we (myself included) tend to listen only insofar as to cue up the next thing to spew from betwixt our lips. He’s also right that this presents a barrier to meaningful two-way conversation.
But I wonder: Is part of the problem that we no longer feel a need to listen without speaking? Is storytelling — in the wizened chief enthralling the tribe by the campfire vein — vanishing from our cultural landscape?
Perhaps we’d all do a bit better if, every now and then, we sat down with our elders and focused only on their stories. Even if it’s at McDonalds.
OK, so it’s been a while. I’ve been busy — so sue me. In random order:
More later. At this rate, much more, much later. 😛
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
When did you become a grown-up?
I thought about that question over the weekend.
As children, our decisions are made for us. To be sure, we may have some trivial option presented — a blue toothbrush or a red one? — but for the most part, our lives are controlled first by our parents, and then by the collective non-wisdom of our pre-teen peer groups.
As we age, we individuate; we develop core identities and make decisions on our own. We learn to establish autonomy through deciding what we accept and reject from our friends, family, and larger culture. At some point, in mental terms quite unrelated to our biological development, we pass over the threshold of adolescence and take unqualified responsibility for the direction of our own lives.
I think some people never really do cross the emotional and psychological hurdle into adulthood. They are content to do what everyone else does, and don’t exercise independence of thought on the really big questions in life. They may delude themselves into thinking that they are unique, but they are as snowflakes in a blizzard — not quite identical in appearance, but comprised of the same basic materials in the same basic order. The whole lets-get-married-and-have-babies-and-live-in-the-suburbs thing comes to mind. So does the I’m-too-cowardly-to-achieve-my-potential routine.
Others are so eager to be different that they go to extremes to prove the point. I think of the teen goth/emo subcultures, for instance, or the thirtysomethings who are covered head-to-toe with ink and metal. Or, more vexingly, the phenomenon of the urban hipster, so eager to be different that his herd is merely more gaily arrayed than the others.
But life ain’t so simple as just appearing the adult; there is a social component to the maturing process that cannot be overlooked. It occurred to me that much of who I am as a person has been kept carefully hidden from most people. Some have greater insight than others, but no one really has the full story, and I suspect that encouraging a fuller understanding might be more trouble than it’s worth. To some degree, I have stood with a foot in both the adult and the pre-adult worlds, unable (until recently) to decide upon a path leading to the past tense of the "who do you want to be when you grow up" question.
Which is why, as I’m trying to lay the groundwork for a departure from the hospital’s employ, the seriousness of my present condition hits home. I’m typing this, for example, from my desk — in my office. The office for which I’ve signed a commercial lease in the Heartside district of Grand Rapids. The office being served by commercial-grade DSL and multi-line business telephony from AT&T. The office with my name and corporate logo on the front door.
I’ve built a company; there’s probably only about a week of work left in the "prep" phase before I am comfortable in beginning wide-scale solicitation of new clients. In the spirit of Project 810, I’ve been actively looking at boats — in fact, there’s a nice little hull for sale in nearby Muskegon that has promise. I’m cutting the ties that have held me in place for 31 years, and as I’m in the homestretch, it occurred to me: I’m actually doing this.
Scary. Really, really, really scary, because with exceptions I can count on my fingers (Stacie and Callista, for sure, and perhaps Rick and Duane and Brian and Emilie) the number of people who get it about my chosen path is small. And that makes the "social" part of this all the more challenging.
I’ve recently subscribed to about a dozen new magazines, including Outside. I like this periodical; it captures my outlook perfectly. As I peruse these monthly bundles of printed delight, I see people younger than I who have accomplished more, done more, lived more than I, and I can’t tell if I’m full of envy or respect. Yet I’m thrilled to start walking down their path, at long last.
Three years ago, I was a 270-pound tub of solid lard. My idea of fun was to stay at home, alone, in a less-than-stellar apartment in Kentwood. I’d have a large pizza and box of chicken strips delivered, then I’d haul out a bag of Doritos and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. I’d watch TV for up to eight hours at a stretch, typically sci-fi or military documentaries. Or play video games. Or view pornography online. Or drive around aimlessly, stopping at one fast-food joint after another. I was content to do my job at the hospital, and enjoy the same ephemeral pleasures over and over and over again, and to trick myself into thinking that I’d somehow magically catch a break "someday." My life was 100 percent aspiration, 0 percent perspiration.
There was, in a sense, an unbroken line of psychological development from my mid-teens through, oh, age 28 or so. Although the details changed over a decade and a half, the essentials were relatively fixed. I was plagued by the perfectly immobilizing mix of arrogance and fear that leads to a higher valuation of the self than one’s objective situation would warrant, but which precludes the ego from reconciling the discrepancy. I still, in vague ways, considered myself superior, and that one day — a day of my choosing, of course — I’d do or be something different. Yet my circumstances gave the lie to my self-perception — a lie that I sensed but scrupulously avoided.
Then, something happened. I’m not sure what the trigger point was, but within a six-week period, everything changed. I walked away from Western Michigan University, from the Herald and grad school. I nearly choked to death on a glutton’s breakfast, prompting my first engagement of a physician in a decade. My brother and his lovely wife brought a perfect baby boy into the world.
I was a bit slow to appreciate the long-term impact of these three events. The most noticeable aftereffect was rapid weight loss; I shed 110 pounds in about nine months. But doing that had other implications, less obvious to others. My testosterone levels shot through the roof, helping me to realize that I really did have an aggressive, masculine side, and that he was eager to make up for lost time. I actually started dating, albeit awkwardly at first (and heaven help me, why are all the beautiful women who are attracted to me so damned psychotic?). I got fit — eight-mile runs became routine, and now I study two martial arts. I had to come to terms with a host of issues I had previously let fester — my life’s goals, my limitations, my identity as a social and sexual being.
Yet all of those developments still left me half-done. I had engineered the physical and attitudinal changes, but I was still very much a man without a functioning teleology.
The "other shoe" dropped early last October. For months, when I went to write at Kava House, I’d update my list of things to do. The list started to increase in scope, moving from a gotta-do-this-by-Friday thing to a goal-for-next-year thing. As I reflected more and more on the big things I wanted to do, I realized that these activities were a reflection of a very different personality than the one I used to possess. I really believe that much of the psychological changes I’ve experienced have been, to some degree, hormonal — and I’m still coming to terms with what it all means. Sheila and I talked about women who have hysterectomies; they experience a wide array of changes, physical and mental, because of the immediate effective onset of menopause. I experienced something similar, with the massive flood of testosterone that began with simultaneous radical weight loss and intense aerobic exercise.
Anyway, last October, I worked on the to-do list with an eye toward what I wanted to accomplish after my return from Las Vegas, when I experienced a blinding flash of the obvious: All the existential angst I felt about my place in the world was a byproduct of having no clear path. Yet, for the first time, I began to understand just what path I wanted to take. Hence the birth of the whimsically named Project 810.
Yes, I’ve planned big before, and failed to execute. This is different. The fact that I’m sitting in my own 950-square-foot office tells me it’s different. The fact that I got up this morning at the ass crack of dawn to be in Grand Ledge at 7 a.m. for Tony’s BNI meeting tells me it’s different. The fact that two weeks ago, I was prepared to drop everything and drive to Massachusetts to pick up a sailboat tells me it’s different.
Only one hurdle left.
Just one.
Will I have the courage to send out my first batch of marketing materials this weekend?
Time flies when … you’re doing things. Even when Spring only pretends to arrive. Update:
All for now.
Lately, the chief correction I’ve been receiving from my various karate instructors (primarily the Wise and Mighty Shihan, and Sensei Chris) is to "relax." I’m told that I have waaaay too much tension, and that this is working against me.
In a purely academic sense, I recognize and concede the point. A person who is tense tends to telegraph his next move — especially when an opponent can read the visuals hidden in subtle shoulder and hip movements, or when he’s skilled in touch-reference reads — and sacrifices speed and power because the tensed muscle has to be released and re-tasked, which takes time and energy.
OK, so I get it. But I usually can’t feel the tension.
I don’t dispute that it’s there; those who see it are skilled in such things. What has prompted some reflection, though, is my difficulty in identifying the tension and correcting it.
Before I changed things up a bit in early 2005, I lived such a high-stress life that my expectation of what constituted stress was sharply adjusted upward. After I left the Herald and grad school, it took me months to be comfortable just coming home from the hospital and not have to do anything.
I thought I had kicked the stress habit. But perhaps not?
Another thing to work on.
Vacation week — I only spent a day and a half in the office.
I am quite pleased with progress this week on my new business venture. Not only do I have all the legal stuff resolved, but I’ve put together a great Web site and promotional materials. I’m half-way through prospecting for the "writing for publication" list, and will be preparing a direct-mail package for, at first, local business writing gigs.
So, I was sitting in an undisclosed location yesterday, working on some promotional brochures for Tony’s law practice. At the table next two me, two drop-dead-gorgeous women were drinking coffee and chatting merrily.
As the pair prepared to leave, they joined hands, leaned over the table, and kissed each other with copious tongue for, oh, a good 30 seconds. Then they nuzzled for another full minute before putting on their coats and leaving the venue.
Mmmm.