How to Treat People Nice

It feels like one of those basic lessons, the things we pick up from the time we're about 2 years old.  Be nice to people.  It isn't always easy, but if we pay attention, we can usually remember.

We stopped in at a furniture maker, and one of the craftsmen spend half an hour talking with us about how he uses his tools, how he selects his wood, what kinds of pieces he likes to make.  He didn't have to do that — we weren't immediate customer prospects — but he was engaged with the work and we were engaged with him.

We were talking with a friend last night about her work as an executive assistant, and how much she enjoys working with her current boss.  They get along, they joke, and they're effective.  She has a real affection for him, and it's obvious that he's equally happy to be working with her.

We had coffee this morning with a local professional who's giving us advice on starting our business.  He was thoughtful and willing to explain the obvious to us civilians, pointed out common business pitfalls, and was clear about where his professional expertise stopped.

As simple and everyday as these exchanges are, though, it's important to keep them in mind and recognize that we do them on purpose.  Because we were also met this morning by an e-mail from a friend whose workplace has become untenable, who literally has to be reading something on her phone when she walks into the door of her office to distract her from the fact that she's going to endure the place for another day.  The simple struggles of reduced budgets are made into complicated struggles, with recriminations about her commitment and capabilities.  The two years until retirement are seemingly as interminable as Moses and the Israelites in the desert.

We know of a workplace in which the leader is openly proud of having created a culture of fear and uncertainty.  We know of a workplace in which all of the successes are attributed to leadership, and all of the struggles are attributed to ineffective employees.  We know of a workplace in which worker loyalty is questioned for using sick days — not even vacation days, but sick days.  We know of a popular business writer who crows about how important it is to find and retain excellent staff, and who personally is dismissive and demeaning and reduces strong employees to tears.

Businesses are a crucial part of our lives.  We spend half of our waking hours at work; the relationships we have with employers and co-workers are vital to our identity and our mental health.  Why is it so often the case that those relationships are broken?  We're not talking about a GM factory with 30,000 unionized workers fighting against a distant corporate bureaucracy, we're talking about places where every single employee could stand together in a moderately large room.  Why is that so hard to do?

There seem to be a lot of people who missed out on that early training, those basic lessons on how to be kind and generous.  So, although it seems basic and not needing to be said, let's say it anyway:  treat people nice.

(On a related note, our nation took an important step yesterday in treating people nice.  With respect.  With equality.  We know what it means for US to be married, and we're grateful that others are now more able to have that same fundamental joy.  There are still lots of individual states that haven't yet recognized marriage equality — but they're coming around, one by one.  So here's a toast to the end of the Defense of Marriage Act.  Our marriage is best defended when all marriages are defended.)

Clarity of Decisions

We went last night to Burlington, and had a lovely dinner at L'Amante. But that was only a small part of why we went.

Our anniversary is on the 25th, but we've decided that it should be like the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and extend over several events on several days.  So although yesterday was the 21st, we opened the anniversary jubilee with a concert by Tommy Emmanuel at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts. Aside from being an astonishingly good player, he's also an embodiment of joy.  It's clear that playing music brings him a fulfillment that most of us achieve only rarely.

As part of his show, he does a little teaching.  Not one-on-one with a student on stage, but he walked us through how he developed and learned to play a particular arrangement of the Beatles' "Lady Madonna," in which he simultaneously plays the bass and the melody.  He figured out two bars.  Slowly.  And he practiced those for a long time, slowly and badly, until he'd got them under control.  Then he moved to the next two bars, and did the same thing.  He really wanted to encourage all of us that we can do remarkable things if we do them with patience.

If I can shorthand his rules for learning, they'd be something like this.

1. Every time you learn something new, you're asking your fingers to do something they haven't ever done before.  And they can't, yet.
2. You're practicing.  You're not making music.  The music comes later, once the skills are established.
3. Don't let anybody hear you practice.  It's not enjoyable for them, and it adds a layer of self-critique and expectation that gets in the way.
4. Repetition is the only way to learn a skill.

He also told us a little about his early career.  I'd already known that his father started a family band when Tommy and his brother Phil were still in grade school, and that he was playing public shows when he was six.  But after his dad died when he was eleven, he was a little rootless.  "When I was fifteen, I ran away from home, to move to the city and be a guitar player.  I didn't want to be around bullies any more, so I left them."  

There's a sharp clarity to that decision.  This is what I want.  The other kids and the teachers in my rural community don't get it.  So let me do what I need to do to get to what I want.  It's amazing to consider how easy some choices can be if you focus on your goals.

The problem is that our goals are complex and mixed.  We want A... but we also want B, and C, and R, and J.  I read once in a planning journal that "we all want social, walkable communities, but we also want our cars, and we want a big lawn... You don't get what you want; you get what you want most."

I know a lot of folks who are waiting to do what they want.  "In a few years, I'll be able to..."  "Once I retire, I can..."  "If my job wasn't so demanding, I could..."  And yes, there are demands, and there are obligations, and there are comforts.  But I think, if we're patient and focused and consistently choose what we want from our deepest core, that there's a Tommy Emmanuel inside all of us.  We can do remarkable things, if we do them. 

On Waking from Nightmares

It seems that there are some neuroscience researchers at Berkeley who are experimenting with a way to video-record your dreams.  Man, I would buy one of those things in a minute.

I have lots of dreams, most of them early in the morning after a good night of sleep.  Especially if I stay in bed too long, like I did this morning.  Between 6 and 9, I had four fully formed dreams, each with a complete storyline and recognizable characters.  I engage in conversations, think about my motives and opportunities, and work amidst people who seem not to recognize how strange all of this is (nor do I, really).

And I'm pop-Freudian enough to believe that my dreams have meaning, that they are visual metaphors for some emotional difficulty I'm experiencing.  So when I'm in the back seat while my ex-mother-in-law is driving at high speed on a complex series of highway ramps that none of us have ever been on before, and she's missing curves and leaving her lane and running over cones and barriers while carrying on a running commentary about how she hopes we won't get lost... I know that's not about driving, it's about last week's meetings.

And when I stumble into a major handball tournament (though of course the game is some unknown hybrid of handball and baseball), and I'm clearly expected to compete though I don't know what team I'm on and I'm playing left-handed because it feels like I'm just supposed to do that... I know that's not about athletics, it's about managing work processes while feeling like I no longer understand either the means or the ends toward which we work, and feeling like I'm unable to use my best abilities.

(The reason why I want this nightmare-recording machine, by the way, is because the physical characteristics and settings of these dreams are so richly portrayed.  The handball tournament was in a gymnasium that was easily 400 feet long, 200 feet across, and ten or more stories tall.  The wood floor was gleaming new, all the walls were white, and we all seemed to know where we should be without the benefit of any striping of the floor or markings on the wall. And the tournament organizer was mid-lunch, her face covered with huge smears of pesto: grainy and glossy and emerald green.)

The last one was the most dense of all.  I was starting a new job (check).  I didn't know what I was doing (check.)  I had a colleague who was inconsolable over her inability to change her circumstances (check).  And I was reminding myself that I had to write a blog post about all of it (et voila).

The part of that episode that my dream-self wanted to write about was my encounter with another failed pool room, which was in my dream a stylized version of The Green Room in Durham NC.  Someone told me it had closed, and I wanted to go peer through the windows, to see it empty and remember all of the wonderful times I'd had there.  Like visiting the funeral home to see the body in the open casket: as memory, as longing, as respect, as the recognition of finality and the start of grieving.  But when I arrived, I discovered that the building had been inhabited by another recreation enterprise, the Sherman Bowl.  They'd jammed ten bowling lanes into that tiny space, and all were well occupied.  Now, the Sherman Bowling Center is a real bowling alley, a 50-lane megacenter I bowled at while growing up in Muskegon, with a full-scale billiard room, a restaurant on one end and a cocktail lounge on the other.  A bowling alley like that (and its parking lot) is equivalent in size to a supermarket, so to see it decline into a neighborhood storefront the size of a Starbucks felt like another sign of the working-class apocalypse.

And that dream comes, I think, from the conditions of Vermont.  Any drive through Rutland or Poultney or even Fair Haven puts you in touch with some truly glorious 19th and 20th Century downtown buildings, most of which are occupied by half-alive businesses — limping, ribs showing, exhausted and resigned to fate.  It's easy to say that the only businesses that make it here are the major chains like Staples, McDonalds, Dunkin, the big grocers.  But that's not entirely true.  There are a small but crucial handful of boutique retailers and excellent restaurants, personalized businesses that rely on obsession and minute care.  What doesn't work is the middle ground.  What doesn't work is coasting, doing what you do because it's what you do.

I'm leaving that middle ground and walking, with Nora, into the boutique world, the world in which your current client receives your full attention and accumulated experience.  I always liked working in retail.  Someone comes in with a small problem and leaves with that problem resolved; comes in with a small desire, and leaves with that desire fulfilled.  There's an aliveness, an attentiveness, to that encounter that is far greater than any ongoing committee meeting in which I know before each person speaks what they're likely to say, just as within that context they also can predict me.

So, although I slept too long, I'm now waking from my nightmare, holding the remnants of lives past but awake to the work of the day.

July 12 marks the transitional moment — more news to come.

Dybbukim and Malokhemlekh

Nora and I had a tense day yesterday.  We're both so eager for our new lives to start that we can both get ahead of ourselves, dealing with the next thing instead of focusing on each other now.  Gotta do this, gotta do that, gotta do the other... and her list of obsessions and my list of obsessions don't perfectly align, so we don't have the same next thing.  And because the future's not here yet, I still have to drive back to Boston every Sunday, so there's that tension added into the mix.

But Nora also reminded me that it's not only the future that weighs on us.  She introduced me to a Yiddish word, the dybbuk or demon.  More accurately, I discovered today, the dybbuk is the wandering soul of a dead person that enters the body of a living person and controls her or his behavior.

Yeah, I got some of those.  More than a few of them were me.

When I was in my late 20s, I went to a weight-loss group.  I thought I needed it.  But of course, it was really my dybbuk who needed it.  At that moment, I weighed 134 pounds, was running 35 miles a week, able to 10K in 39 minutes and ride my bike over the ridge of the Coast Range and back for Sunday fun.  But the person who went to those meetings was still twelve years old, the fat kid who got picked last for baseball; all I could see in the mirror was that wandering soul who told me what to do.

When I finished my Ph.D., I had several unsuccessful years on the job market, couldn't find a publisher for my first book, watched improbable colleagues land improbable tenure-track jobs.  I thought I was done.  But that was my dybbuk advising me, the wandering soul who needed the all-A report card, needed to have someone else tell him that he was good.

When I worked for a security consultant, doing the same job for each client by erasing cells in the algorithm and filling in a few new ones; or when I worked for the school reform organization that had no interest in kids and their needs, I thought I was being ignored.  But really, it was my dybbuk who felt ignored, the wandering soul with the oversized ideas and the missing family.

I carry far too many dybbukim.  They're heavy, make me less supple, place obstacles that are no less challenging for being unreal.  It's harder to find my malekh, the good angels.  There are at least as many of those in my past as there are disturbed spirits, but they don't crowd the stage like the dybbuk.  The dybbuk are kind of like conspiracy theorists — they don't make a lot of sense, but they make a lot of noise, and they can't be convinced by fact or logic or persistence.

The malokhemlekh like quiet.  They come out like hummingbirds, when there's no sudden movements and the air is calm.  If you sit on the porch with an iced tea and a wife, and look at the mountains and the freshly mown lawn, sometimes they appear.  You can't seek them out, but they'll find you if you don't move too fast.