An Unwinding

The Delaware River near Dingman's Ferry (from my kayak)

In the winter of 2000 the Internet bubble was at its bubbliest.  And I had just gotten a job as the Internet guy for Ruder Finn's Capital Market Communications group.  Fortunately I didn't know that the storm clouds were gathering even as I merrily deboxed my red Swingline stapler.  But by August 2001 the handwriting wasn't just on the wall, it was stamped on my forehead: 'You're fired.'  After celebrating a wan 41st birthday on September 10 ... September 11th burned the world down.  All in all it was a pretty shitty start to the decade for just about everybody.

Passengers: There's another bubble right behind this one

Even if you hadn't just gotten laid off -- and I had -- the profession of investor relations was not a great place to be (see Sarbanes-Oxley -- it's not pretty).  My then wife -- I phrase I'd rather never ever utter again -- put her substantial people skills to work as a real estate broker.  She made a bundle.  I dusted off my mortgage making skills, and climbed on board.  But I didn't make a bundle -- my heart wasn't in it.  (I can be pretty lousy at stuff that I don't care about.)  And how much money do we need, anyhow? thought I.  Ah well.  It seems that More was the correct answer.  Who knew?

There followed a couple of years where the money seemed to fall out of the sky in great clumps.  And, then, in 2007 it slowed to a trickle.  2008?  Well, you know.  In our world, the money just stopped completely.  So we sold the place in the Poconos.  And then the place in Washington Heights.  And finally the marriage itself just stopped completely.

It's called retirement

I hated being a mortgage broker.  I'm lousy at setting up a pipeline and just cranking it out.  I love to think about this and that, and to put stuff in improbable piles.  I'm really good at that.  But somewhere along the way, I just stopped trying.  I didn't see the angle.  

All I managed to do was to throw paint around my garage in the Poconos, and that almost never pays (Jackson Pollock aside).  My therapist said that such behavior didn't make sense for a fifty-year old.  Seventy-year old, maybe; fifty-year old, no.  It's called retirement, she said.

These are the blue panels that my buddies Don and Chris and I made.  (After three years of hanging there they had gotten kinda tired.)  On the night we made them, it was zero degrees and felt even colder in my unheated garage.  We smoked cigars, and drank wine and bourbon. Then we smeared paint on brown paper, folded it in two, and carefully squished it on these old doors.  This may have been my happiest memory of the decade. 

This is a picture of Dingman's creek I took during a raging storm.  The creek was in full flood mode and had torn this foot bridge from its foundations.  I printed the picture out in three by five inch chunks, laminated them, and then connected them with brass grommets by hand.  Why?  I have no idea.  

By measure of effort, this process should have produced the Mona Lisa (it took months) but I actually kinda hated it when it was finished.  But it was really fun to do though.  I would listen to Garrison Keillor on the crummy old shop radio while I tried to hammer the grommets instead of my thumbs, which I manged to do about 90 percent of time. 

This is a branch that I spray painted green and suspended with dark wires hung from the tree above and anchored to a tree stump below.  I don't know why I did this either.  It took about 10 minutes but I left it there for a couple of years until it just fell down soon before we had to sell the place.

We had already agreed to sell  -- in order to get a bigger house -- but when the real estate bubble burst we just did the selling part. We knocked some money off the price because we sold it to some friends, and it just made sense.  Before we could sell we had to have the septic tank checked.  Worried that it would fail the test, I went with the guys who checked it out.  This was January of 2009.

Good bye Poconos.

Ever feel like you're losing your mind?

This is a mature Sea Squirt. It's really beautiful, isn't it? Translucent and 'Avatar' Blue, and all.

In its larval state, the Sea Squirt has a tail. It swims around to eat and get out of the way of danger. But when it matures it attaches itself to something and just absorbs the nutrients it needs from the water.

Oh, and it goes through one other transformational step -- it 'auto-digests' its brain. You see, like its tail, the Squirt no longer needs its brain, which was handy when there was a lot to do. So no more brain.

What an efficient bit of evolutionary adaptation!

And that's why I moved out of the suburbs.

Thanks to Dr. Stuart Brown and his book Play! as discussed on Dr. Ginger Campbell's always wonderful Brain Science Podcast.

How stories make sense of life ... and sometimes get in the way

Outliers is a sneaky book.

On first glance Malcolm Gladwell's title sounds like a statistics text; then just another book about outstanding achievers -- those plucky mail room clerks who end up running the company. But that's just the storyline he's trying to overcome.

He acknowledges that those clerks have to be smart, ambitious and hard working to rise to the top but notes that they'll never make it unless they have a lot of help -- and luck -- along the way.

'Well, that's a profound statement of the obvious!' you might say.

But it seems to me that myths like those peddled by Horatio Alger have contributed to our current plight. For thirty years we've been told that great men (and women) will rise to success if they can follow their own interests in a free marketplace and that society will benefit as a result. Great men rise up and society benefits from the trickle down.

Alan Greenspan was among the most powerful advocates of that kind of idea -- thanks a lot Ayn Rand! But in October of 2008 he testified before Congress that the current 'Great Recession' had caused him to question the narrative underlying his entire life.

For generations we've idolized men like Henry Ford and FDR, Reagan and Jack Welsh (more on him later) -- and Alan Greenspan -- while forgetting that each rose from communities that made their success possible.

The message I take from Outliers is to stop waiting for someone to save us and start building the kinds of communities that make it possible for the next generation to stand out.

Epilogue - By the way, when asked the secret of his success Jack Welsh said that it was his ability to tell compelling stories. While that's a great skill for 'outliers' maybe all of us could pay closer attention to the messier truths behind the stories we tell.

Epiphenomina or in the Image of God

Dr. Warren Brown speaks to dynamical systems and the physical underpinnings of immortality.

Watch this space for more...

In the meantime listen to the podcast.

Happy New Year!

The doctor tells Homer Simpson he has a rare disease and is going to die -- in a week! Homer resolves to live every moment he has left with gusto. On his last night he stays up to see the dawn while listening to Larry King read the Bible on tape. But he doesn't die and the doctor says it was all a big mistake!

As the credits rolls we see Homer on the couch eating pork rinds and drinking Duff while staring blankly at Celebrity Wive's Makeover Smack Down. Homer is a hot mess and can't seem to change.

Just before the holidays someone posted a classic question on a training and development group discussion page on LinkedIn -- 'What book has changed YOUR life?' Generally, I've been amazed at how worthless these discussion pages are. They almost always attract vapid comments about how smart the author is and why you should hire them.

But this one was different.

First of all, there were more than a hundred posts -- more than I've ever seen. Second, they were quite thoughtful and unselfconscious. The posts listed the Bible and The Power of Positive Thinking; Dale Carnegie and Anthony Robbins; Seven Habits... and 'The Fifth Discipline...'. I particularly loved an impassioned post that praised the transformative power of the Qur'an at great length and eloquence; and then, said, 'And I also liked the One Minute Manager.

Amid all the 'Best of' lists and reflections on the year as it flickers out, the 'Book' question is a pretty standard one. But it highlights a question that has burned in me for years and I hope will yield meaningful action in the new year -- How do we remake ourselves to do what needs to be done in a changing world?

I'm excited to find out!  But for now, back to the couch.

Beauty, Desire and Sales

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Laughter -- Universal Prosody and the Protoconversation

There was a massive wave of laughter as I walked back to my seat. The play was Sheer Madness at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and they were laughing at a particularly broad joke at the top of the second act.

'On man that's cheap,' I thought as I continued to the back of the house. The show was already one of the longest running shows in the United States and that was 15 years ago -- and it's still running! I had seen it maybe six times because my then girlfriend (now wife) was playing the ditzy hairdresser role for the last year.

I was not in the mood to see it again. But as I trudged up the bleachers I stopped listening to the play and focused on the laughter. The audience had completely lost it and by the time I got back to my seat I had too.

In his outrageously insightful book on Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman says, 'Nature loves good timing. The sciences find synchronies throughout the natural world, whenever one natural process entrains or oscillates in rhythm with another. When waves are out of synch, they cancel each other; when they synchronize, they amplify. In the natural world, pacing occurs with everything from ocean waves to heartbeats; in the interpersonal realm, our emotional rhythms entrain.'

He notes that our bodies are way ahead of our minds when it comes to this kind of thing and that the rhythm or prosody of speech can align us with another before the meaning of the words sinks in. This protoconversation, as he calls it, has the power to either connect or disconnect us depending on if we're in the groove or not.

That's all nice to know but the laugh's the thing!