Paid Work

Struggling in this space again.

I just came back from a meeting with a client, a pro bono client. During the last year I have had the opportunity to work on a couple of very interesting projects: one more of an organization change and development piece, and the other a strategic planning process, both for free.

Most of the time I am fine with that. The organizations are worthy, the people good to work with, and the work interesting to me. Some of the time I'm not so fine with it. It's a continuation of that conversation after dinner with my friend a couple of weeks back. It's about whether you have to be paid something to feel that you are of value.

It's beginning to feel like you do, or maybe it's feeling this moment like I do. Funny. What that value is is all over the place. If I think of a number that would represent a reasonable consulting per diem for me now--maybe even one a little on the low side--then one gig I am getting paid for is a little less than 2/3rds of that, another is around 1/7th of it, while the organization I am working with on the pro bono I did today is valuing my time at about half of my "low" reasonable rate. Confusing? When you factor in that full time work at my best recent rate of pay would have been 1/3rd of my "low" reasonable rate, yeah.

I think this is called reductio ad absurdum. Take the argument to its ridiculous extreme.

So this is a stupid exercise? Right? Then why does the question of my worthwhileness seem to loom so large for me right now? Because someone is not seeing me as worthwhile enough to pay me? That's a helluva comment on the organizations I have been working with for nothing.

Crap! If I'm not careful I could be like one of those birds that flies in ever decreasing circles until it finally flies right up its own...

Nevermind. Let's just leave that image hanging there for the nonce.

"He's Angry about Getting Old"

It's the caption on a New Yorker cartoon sent by an old friend and reader. The drawing shows a whitehaired old man sitting at the window of his reasonably nice NYC aprtment. His wife is on the couch talking on the phone and the line is hers. He is holding a scoped rifle pointed at the window.

I think in my case the anger precedes the getting old part. But there are things to be angry about getting old. What you missed, what you didn't do, what got in the way, what disappointed,... and isn't it so rational to get stuck on that crap and stay there. (Please read irony into the foregoing.)

Getting angry is partly why I started this blog. To be completely honest it is something I have struggled with, gotten better at, and still struggle with. It's easy to have some pretty black and white judgments about temper. I do. And I get angry. I get angry at real and perceived injuries or injustices. I grumble about annoyances. I snap at people I care about. I'm not very nice much of the time. Funny, what's also true is that I don't trust people who are unfailingly nice. I don't believe them.

I probably used to get angry at drivers like me. Old people who drove slow. Now I get angry at the young ones who go roaring around me and cut in. Grumble, grumble. I felt richly rewarded one Sunday when someone not happy with my going the speed limit on a residential street arterial zoomed around me and sped off only to be stopped within block by a police cruiser that had been just ahead. There is some justice.

In 12 Step work, this is fourth step stuff. Taking inventory about how I haven't lived up to my own values and standards.

Yes, old friend. There is more work to be done. And I'm not just angry about getting old.

Conversations about Dying

A friend has been sending me things to read about death and dying and talking about his own experiences in dealing with the death of loved ones; and it has gotten me doing even more thinking about my own experiences and thoughts about it.

I'm not sure I have ever been afraid of dying, or at least not in conscious memory. If I have been "afraid" or concerned about anything, it is more about running out of time than dying itself. And now that there is some reality to "running out of time," that doesn't seem like so much to me anyway. I did what I did, I've done what I have done, I will continue to do the best I know how. What else is there?

I've dug at this a bit to see where it comes from and I am, at the moment, of two minds about it. One is that since there is no "after" then once it happens it won't mean anything anyway. As in "over, light switch off, room dark." The other is that at some point fairly early in my life I must have been at a point of feeling that I had nothing left to lose, and at that point I let go of any fears about dying.

Lest I leave you with the impression that I am some phlegmatic sort, anyone who knows me at all can disabuse you of that notion. I am anything but phlegmatic. Reactive would be a more apt description.

But I do think it is so that I am not afraid of dying. Now that does not mean that I do not think about it. This blog should be evidence enoguh of that. But what I think about is not the "what" of it, but the "how." I think the most important thing for me is not what or when, but how I am, how I "be" in the process of it. Will I find it come upon me with wit as Mercutio gravely wounded declares a plague on Montague and Capulet? Or how about as Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light," and go down fighting the good fight? Or with a will like Robert Louis Stevenson? "Under the wide and starry sky, /Dig the grave and let me lie. /Glad did I live and gladly die, /And I laid me down with a will."

It is the ultimate "you can run, but you can't hide," so why fight it?
More to explore.

Oh Life, It's Bigger...

One of my favorite songs, "Losing My Religion."

So, this inquiry has taken me to another reflection. I think about my life, my adult life, post the childhood tsouris, and what I remember experiencing is some good times, and some really good times, and then some real crashes. As an example, I'd be doing some really good work, interesting and engaging and contributing, and then a series of minor or not so minor breakdowns. It's almost like driving just fine for a number of years and then having three or four fender benders or worse in a couple of months.

Sometimes it got so that I would wonder when the other shoe would drop. And when it did drop, how complicit was I in the crash?

This is different than the things I know I made mistakes about, mistakes I made out of haste or doing something for convenience, or thinking I could get away with something that was certain to catch up with me. This is stuff that seemed like the bad times lottery--that just happened.

Yeah, I know stuff doesn't "just happen." One of my favorite books in recent years is Jerry Harvey's "How Come When I get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints are Always on the Knife?" That's about as vivid a title as I've ever seen. Aptly descriptive of the idea that even when it seems like the universe is handing you a trial, that if you look closely enough, something you did had something to do with it. And it's not blame or fault.

So I guess there are two questions for me to deal with here. The first is what about this makes me any different than anyone else? I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who experiences this. But I suppose it could be that not everyone experiences it. The second and related question is whether I let this affect me differently than others let it affect them? Do I respond to it differently? Could my operative injunction--the "act" I have been digging at--be part of this?

Time to sit in the questions a bit.

Head Shot

So I just had some pictures taken by a professional studio, probably the first since I was a little kid. I've always had a weird thing about having my picture taken. I think that I can't take a good one, and as a consequence I can't. Always something stiff or awkward about it: a smile that looks like it is losing it around the edges, a grin a little too forced, or a no smile flat affect that looks pretty much like a mug shot.

At one point I had a license picture that was almost pleasant, but then when I went to get the new "enhanced" one, the pic they took makes me look like an unhappy corpse. I envy people like my spouse who can never seem to take a bad one.

I wonder how much of my issue with it is fearing that the camera sees things that I don't want to be seen, like an indigenous primitive in some barely explored place being afraid that the camera will snatch their soul. I think it is true that the face is a map of a life's experience. It's all there to be read. The thing is that most of the time it is in animation and there isn't that moment of stillness that lets you see under the surface. Photographs freeze that moment.

Given age there is more to the map, more to be revealed. I saw a recent picture of someone I have known since 1963. They're not a close friend. Could have been once, but it didn't happen. Their life of privilege leaves a blandness to the face that is startling. Another acquaintance's online portrait shows their scrappiness and energy coming through their eyes.

Well, I'm looking at the one from my shoot that I like the best. There's no smile or grin. The look is serious but the face seems very open, the gaze straight on. The woman at the studio said something about "someone you can trust." I think there is a lot of experience in that face, maybe even some wisdom, and maybe it's settled enough to finally take a good picture.

Passages

So this whole blog is nominally about passages, and today I read a David Brooks piece that got me to thinking about the final passage. Brooks was writing about someone who faced a deteriorating life with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Syndrome) and concluded that life wasn't about simply living as long as you can, but about what constituted life--what made life worth living as it were. Brooks was exploring this to pose some questions about how health care costs have balooned largely in the endeavor to eke a few more weeks or months out of an existence that is hard to characterize as living, with no "cures" for cancer, stroke, heart disease, or alzheimers in sight.

I live in one of two states with an assisted suicide law, and my wife and I have had conversations about this. I'm pretty clear that I wouldn't mind simply passing on when the quality of my life deteriorates to the point that it is not worth it to me to continue. The law isn't set up that way. You have to be definitively diagnosed as dying within a few months and have that confirmed with a second opinion. It is not about quality of life.

We have also done all the right stuff about medical powers of attorney and DNR directives and the like. I have elected for no extraordinary means, no hydration, and no feeding. Of course one hears the horror stories about hospital staff that fail to read or honor instructions in the moment of crisis and heroically violate the patient's wishes. Too bad it isn't respectable to just off yourself when you think you are done.

Stop. You can have your reaction, but don't make assumptions about what I know or don't know about this. There aren't many people outside of my familiy members whose deaths I have known about at the time or close to the time they died. Maybe a dozen or so. Of those, four were suicides, suicides in the prime of life associated with some kind of deep malaise or depression. There were three men and one woman. Two of the men were gay men: one who could not reconcile his orientation with his own vision of himself, the other in the throes of a depression about the loss of relationship. The other man and the woman were apparently despondent about their loss of identity because of the loss of jobs with long-term employers as well as suffering longer term depression.

I was particularly close to the man and quite angry about his decision, because it came at a time when he was making a transition that I had made only a couple of years earlier leaving the same company and moving to an entirely different part of the country and then starting over. He had stayed in his lovely colonial home with a new bright and charming wife.

So I don't think about this casually. One could argue I have more experience than most to draw on. My father's adult life was effectively a slow and very destructive suicide by means of alcohol, not to mention the fact that there were two suicide "attempts" while I lived with him in my late teens, and another that resulted in severe nerve damage about a year later.

I've survived depression. I've survived more transitions than many people have--big ones that make my current passage seem like small potatoes. But when the time comes for that last passage I sure would like to make the choice to just go without any hospital heroics. And if I am threatened with being in a condition where I could not make that decision, I hope I am able to make it early.

Meanwhile there are things to do and enjoy.

What Do We Know, Anyway?

This may be a bit of a ramble.

Writing about my "act" (in Landmarkese) got me to thinking about what we seem to have learned about the mind in the last century or so. [BTW, I'm not giving up that particular line of inquiry just yet.]

When I was coming of age Freudians still held sway and the apparently approved course for an enlightened being was to spend years in analysis unpacking their particular formations of ego, id, and super ego. Like so many "schools" following a founding guru, the followers ended up being more doctrinaire than the founder and eventually the "school" began to fracture.

We've seen this since with other approaches--neuro-linguist programming (NLP)--Rogerians, who seemed nothing like Carl Rogers, and most of the others, no doubt. When I worked in an administrative capacity in a treatment facility in the 70s behaviorism was the big deal. I have no idea what is currently in vogue, but I do read that the field of psychology is pretty fractured, to the point where the DSM-5 is not likely to make its publication schedule in 2013.

Advances in genetics and neuroscience are having some kind of impact, but from my vantage point it does not seem like clarity is emerging, and things seem to get caught in political agendas all too easily. Take the "gay gene" research for example.

So while Landmark may have something in this business about how we wrap our lives around an early self-defensive self-protective injunction, I'm pretty sure it is not "the way" anymore than thousands of other "the ways" that have preceded it. There are lots of pathways to self-awareness and each will have its values along the way, detours, and even dead ends. Doesn't mean you can't turn the car around and go a different way.

More recently the variation of inquiry that has most intrigued me is narrative studies. The idea being that perhaps what we are more than anything else is the stories we tell about ourselves or that we discover about ourselves. I am particularly fond of this quote:

“He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.”

                                            --Norman MacLean, Young Men and Fire

My "Act" Redux 1

"Be a man!"

Another candidate for the "act" injunction. But this one just feels way too generic. Don't all us XYs get these messages over and over again for all of our lives? I mean really, even the damned ED medication ads imply it. Got to be part of what contributes to a national epidemic of depression and anger. If one in ten is unemployed and one in five is either unemployed or underemployed, and the ones who are men have a lifetime subscription to the messages about the relationship between their employment and their identity, it's a wonder there aren't more instances of impotent male rage in the news.

But enough with the generic.

I'm trying to remember the early years and I'm seem to get about back to five, maybe some glimpses of four. We lived in a little GI Bill bought house on Long Island. I remember hearing pretty much nightly arguments. I remember a time my mother had seen some deal about photos and took me and little sister via bus and at least a transfer or two, and everyone being frazzled and upset. You can see it in the photos that everyone had been crying at some point. The boy in those pictures is every inch the sadsack the adult sometimes later was. Another picture from almost the same time shows a smiling happy kid. It's puzzling to me sometimes. Both those little boys are still in there.

I think it is a good bet that my mother spent the years after she married my father absolutely disappointed in him. She had a little fewer than twenty years after that. A not quite casual comment by an aunt years after my mother had died seems telling, "She thought she was getting the doctor's son." I know in my teens, after she left him, I became the focus of that disappointment.

Maybe there's another injunction in there: "Don't disappoint anyone!"

And another one comes up inside of that, "Don't be wrong!" Maybe especially don't be wrong about figuring this out.

More to chew on.

My "Act"

A long time ago one of my reader friends "encouraged" me to take "The Training"--Erhard Seminars Training or EST. Whatever your opinions or considerations about this (and you may have a lot of them, I sure do), I would ask you to suspend them for the time is takes to read this post. During the 80s I participated in a lot of the EST programs and I found them very useful. I probably stopped about the time Erhard sold the business to his trainers and left the country. There have been a lot of assertions about the man and the programs that I choose not to comment on other than to say that the issues seemed to be well clouded with large sums of money.

My friend has since taken the successor program, The Landmark Advanced series; and while not promoting it to me, talked about how he found it useful to discover his "act," and how it seemed to him that what I am working on here is like symptoms of something underlying or deeper--my "act" as it were. The "act" is apparently in the form of an injunction that comes from very early experiences that you give yourself and organize your life around. His is "Don't fuck up!" That's what I would consider a "nice" one. You know, all masculine and strong. By contrast the ones I have been examining for me seem wimpy and self-demeaning: "You don't deserve it!" (Not enough of an instruction or rule); "Don't really trust anyone!" (But I do, though often to my chagrin), and the current leading candidate "Don't trust yourself!"

That's feeling a lot closer to the mark, and sufficently "yucchhh" to me that it probably has a piece of the real action. Plays into the victim shit rather nicely.

I'm willing to play with this for a while. I trust my friend and his instincts. I'm probably not going to be taking the Landmark program. I'm not willing to play the required enrollment game, besides I'm already "sharing" my inquiry with you. But I'm going to keep looking at this for a while yet, and looking at those early years. Funny that the first other piece of writing I started working on since starting this blog is based on my childhood. Or maybe not.

To Be of Use

The central character of "Cider House Rules" struggles to find his way to "be of use" in a world that persists in confronting him with dilemmas. I identfied, identify with Homer Wells in this and many ways.

The other evening a friend came by to dinner and we got to talking as people of an age will about being of an age. She's younger by a dozen and a half years but was talking about traveling in Europe with her mother. Anyway she asked about what was going on with me and I told her about this blog. She might have enough to hunt it down, but I didn't tell her where to find it. Maybe I will.

Then she started query me about why I was questioning where I am right now. Questioning might not the correct word.

She asked what I was feeling. I told her that I didn't feel "useful." After challenging me that maybe I was attaching that to a 9-5 fulltime job, she enumerated how busy I am. Was it just about the loss of income? What would I do if I were retired?

What's this "useful" about?

Making money? I still make money, just not as much. We'll survive on what's been put away.

Making lots of money? I never made "lots" of money, or what I would call lots of money. In the end I made enough.

Making a difference? Maybe. Making a difference a bigger deal in the corporate world? Probably not. Most of the time it's like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. You make temporary differences that make some difference to a few people and then it gets washed away by the perpetual tide of reorganization and restructure.

Making a difference in the world? I'm not sure whether to puke or laugh insanely. CSN&Y recorded "Chicago" after the riots in 1968. I featured the line "We can change the world." Good luck with that. You might want to stop watching the nightly news. Besides it has all those damn medication ads.

Being valued by others? I'm thinking that except for the people I love, that is pretty overrated.

Having my wife like me may be the most important thing right now. Which reminds me. I have to go move laundry.

Tempus Fugit or It's Only Money

One of the folks in my writing group told us that their mother just recently found out that she had stage 4 bone cancer. The prognosis is not a good one.

What was more impactful for me to hear is that she is only two years older than I am.

In between piecing together some income to go with the social security check, one of the things I have spent time doing lately is calculating how long my retirement savings will last. Between the OMG market drops and the IRS life expectancy tables and my family history, I'm guessing that there's enough, but it is hard not to have a little scarcity mentality.

My relationship with money was shaped first by parents who really screwed up. My mother's brother spent years running down her debts after she died. My father... well if he ever had anything he pretty much lost it down a bottle. I left home at 18 and came into young adulthood during the inflation years when debt was rewarded. I didn't really begin to flatten things out until the nineties, and then put together what I have in the last 15 years.

My wife has started talking about taking several weeks to travel in Europe next year and my first reaction was mild panic. I think I've shifted since hearing about my friend's mother. Only two years older! Of course I had my own bout with prostate cancer about seven years ago.

So it makes you think. We'd joked about cashing in the IRA to buy a Tesla if it looked like my last months were immanent. They'll stop production on the Tesla this year. Guess I have to consider other options.

We started planning the trip this week.

I Want a Little Credit

This has to be the Rodney Dangerfield of ages. Maybe it's because I don't look quite as old as I am, or that things have really changed since my mother tried to teach me to treat "old people" with respect. Maybe that was because when you were this age then, you really were old.

Getting out of bed in the morning is when I feel oldest. It seems to take a bit for things to start operating right. Makes it tough that we have decided that the AM before she goes to work is the best time to work out. Thank heaven for elliptical machines.

I think my cohort and the one just following (the "real" baby boomers) may have shifted the paradign by making something of a fetish about youth. The "Pepsi generation" and all that. We buy a lot of plastic surgery, and all those pill ads on the Nightly News are aimed straight at us. Pee too often, there's betuwhazzis with a list of side effects as long as "Moby Dick." Trouble with medical marketing's TLA (three letter acronym); just take curzital but not if you have any one of fourteen conditions common among those forty or older.

So the respected wise elder role seems to be out. But I'm still beginning to have spare parts put into the machine, yet it seems to be up to me to go visit my grandchildren.

And out in the world, if we still want to engage in commerce, we have to "keep up with the technology." Or at least look like we are. Okay so I blog. [I actually have two, this one and one for commerce, and never the twain shall meet.] I have a facebook account, and, as one friend says, I can't quite figure out whether it really has a function. It does keep me more in touch with my kids and their kids, and has led to a couple of valued connections with people from my past. I also have a twitter account, and that one's even a little stranger to me. LinkedIn I use. But with all of this am I just trying to prove something?

A much younger friend, maybe my son's age, said to me, meaning it as a sort of compliment, "Since you got an iPhone I think you're cool." Jeez, thanks friendo.

I hate to tell all you younguns, but I bought my first computer in 1980. I was accessing a small mainframe by teletype and papertape in 1969, I was emailing and conferencing worldwide in the mid eighties, and blew up my first phone bill in the nineties with my Compuserve account. I have a smart phone. I just don't have to have it plugged into my cerebellum every waking moment. Sometimes I miss payphones, among other things, like a well written letter, or a real book.

No respect. It really is the Rodney Dangerfield of ages, especially now.