Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1 Newspaper. While I am certainly not above whining if my morning newspapers arrive in time for dinner, or Heaven forbid are totally AWOL, I do wish to give a virtual (and most assuredly unheard) huzzah to both of the folks who brought my Sunday tomes this AM. Pouring rain. Each paper double wrapped in plastic.

That there’s just nice peopling.

2 Mugwump. Fence-sitter or fence-sitting. British word. I know we Americans speak English, just like the Brits.

Sometimes they just do it with a bit more style, ya know?

3 Anniversary. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve had a chance to sit down on a Sunday and empty out my internal hard drive by musing. Missed writing about my 39th Wedding Anniversary! Beth and I were on the road for my nieces wedding in Bar Harbor Maine. Lovely place, that. Bar Harbor. Despite the fact that we have a number of places that we each wish to see for the first time, I think Beth and I agree that the coast of Maine was unexpectedly spectacular in all respects.

We plan to find a reason to return, for sure.

39 years married. 42 together. What a ride! I know I have written about this in the past, but we get asked all the time if there is a secret to our marriage. To our love. We have two, neither of which is all that complex, and at least for us, neither of which feels or felt all that difficult over the years. Marriage is not a 50/50 proposition, it’s 100/100; both partners make a primary commitment to the marriage. Never stop courting. Beginning when our firstborn was still a baby we have been on at least one date every week. One night at least, when we are simply two people in love, together, doing the stuff that people do when they are in love. Remember, the honeymoon isn’t over until you say it is!

I do so love you, Dollie.

4 Obituary. James R. Hagerty is the obituary writer/editor for the Wall Street Journal. Once upon a time he wrote a moving opinion piece about the value of writing your own obit. I think he may have included his most recent personal effort writing his own, but my memory may be foggy. No matter. Somewhere I wrote up a draft of my own which is long lost by now, although I did choose the picture I’d like included if I should depart in the nearish future.

Hagerty didn’t give any specific instructions on the picture thing, but the one I’m thinking about really reminds me of what I think I look like at this stage in life.

Writing in this week’s Sunday Times Opinion section Kelly McMasters sorta one-ups Hagerty in her piece: “Why I Write My Obituary Every Year”. It’s a gem of a piece, written around a tight prompt and literally brimming with delicious word nuggets that describe her rationale and her process. “Reflecting on your life isn’t as maudlin as it may seem.” Some of her autobiobituaries were little more than an accounting of the life lived, the most recent iteration simply an update of the previous year’s effort. After particularly unimpressive years she admitted to a bit of embellishment, inventing “facts” that would surely occur if only she lived long enough for them to make it into her last final word. It’s a funny little quirk, that: an aspirational obituary. A forward looking, backward glance.

Ms. McMasters quotes the Times reporter Margalit Fox from the documentary “Obit”: Obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life. McMasters: “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves. Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”

I really like this. As easy as it is for me to do most of the writing in which I indulge, I found it terrifically difficult to write the obituaries for my Dad and then my Mom, even though I knew exactly what I wanted them to say. The process was equal parts heartbreaking and gut-wrenching, so heavy was the weight carried while writing those final chapters. Perhaps writing my own might ease the pain that a loved one may feel if they were so chosen, even if my effort is just an outline for how my people wish to remember me rather than the last version of how I remembered myself.

Living is so much more than simply being alive. More than just not dying today. I was totally taken by surprise by Ms. McMasters’ piece today, and I’m not nearly well enough prepared to update my obituary in time for “Sunday musings…”, at least not this week. I don’t know exactly when I will do so, or if I will try to do it every year, but reading this piece was one of those times when I totally and completely got the author’s perspective, and felt like she knew I was here and was gently encouraging me to listen, to think about more than staying alive.

“[The] obituary exercise taught me the practice and value of holding death close, so I could remember to live.”

I’ll see you next week…

In my travels, and those of my oldest friends and acquaintances, I have come across scores of people who are truly happy. Capable of feeling and giving in to joy. It’s such a special thing to see, and even better to in some way feel a part of that joy, wherever it may be from and whatever may have brought it to life. It’s out there, you know. Sometimes it’s subtle, as gentle and quiet as the proverbial footstep of a butterfly landing on a leaf. Other times it is raucous and riotous and simply blasts through your space like a runaway train.

That’s kinda cool.

Sadly, there are others out there who resent the joy in others. Whether they are themselves happy or not so much, the happiness of another feels to them like losing. It’s more than envy in the unhappy. For these folks it’s as if there is a finite about of happiness and joy in the world; no matter how much of either they may have at any one time they cannot see another’s joy without feeling as if it is somehow draining the reservoir from which they may drink some time in the future. Weird, huh? They sometimes seem more fixated on the blessings of others than on their own, so much so that their own joy slowly seeps away.

Happiness and joy are not limited resources. Quite the contrary. My happiness, my joy is not predicated on your unhappiness or your sorrow, and vice versa. Heavens, if one person’s happiness could come only from another’s despair we’d have long ago slipped into a rather dismal anarchy. No, joy is the ultimate non-zero sum measure. More than that, joy is an exponential multiplier. When you find or see joy in someone else and that vision makes you happy, the amount of happy you get is a full order of magnitude greater than it should be. If that joy and happiness should come to someone who has lately had little of either, well, that’s just so much the better.

Life is pretty good around Casa Blanco right now, and as much as I’d like to think that means it will always be thus that’s not how life works. Regardless, if I should stumble upon you in the midst of something joyous you can be sure that no matter what happens to be going on in my little world I’m surely not going to resent you or your joy. Quite the opposite. I’m going to revel into your happiness and dive into the wake of your joy.

Whether the skies be cloudy or eggshell blue, a glimpse of the sun always warms everyone it touches.

Sunday musings…

It was a Tuesday. For sure. Tuesday is an OR day for me, and I was with my work people on what looked to be a pretty vanilla Tuesday morning. That’s how you like it in the OR: vanilla. A good day is no memory of the operations whatsoever. A great day is one where you remember some interaction with your teammates, something good or funny or nice.

9/11 was definitely a Tuesday. What I remember is being with one group of my people.

Everything about the day was going just like every other Tuesday. Fast cases with great results. Stories flying back and forth between doc, nurses and patients. Just a joy to be doing my job. Until, that is, one of the nurses came into my room and said a plane had hit a tower. To a person our collective response was something like “huh…that’s weird. How tragic,” and then back to work. Back to normal until that very same nurse came back and said a second plane had hit the second tower. We all stopped after that case and headed to the family lounge, a TV and CNN.

I remember being in a similar place when the Challenger blew up, surrounded by colleagues, patients and families. That’s where I was when the first tower collapsed. After that nothing was normal about the day at all. There is literally nothin in my memory banks about the rest of the morning. I know we finished the cases, but then everything came to a full and complete stop. Clinic hours were cancelled, schools let out, and the wheels of American life ground to a halt. The rest of the day was spent in tracking down my brother (traveling now by car from Chicago to Connecticut), and best friend (stranded in Brazil). The skies were empty for days.

Our new normal had just kicked in.

My parents worried about an attack on our soil from Germany to the east (U-Boats off the coast of New England) or Japan from the west (a friend posted the story of a Japanese pilot who actually fire-bomb Oregon!). As a child our politics and our lives were spent worrying about the specter of a communist attack. As an adult, a father and a grandfather, it is now the fear of Jihad unleashed. The post-Reagan/post-Berlin Wall years of relative peace and security seem so very long ago now, don’t they?

The reality, of course, is that we are far safer than we think we are. Yet our own personal realities are driven by the same psychology that led our parents to fear a coastal invasion, for us to fear Russian bombers. We march on each day, as we must. We march on so that each day’s completion becomes one more tiny victory in yet another long war fought for us mostly between the ears, so much like the Cold War before it. We seek victory once again in the daily act of living our normal lives.

We remember, though. Like I remember that it was a Tuesday. We never forget, nor should we try to forget. It is in the remembering and carrying on despite the remembering that we do our tiny part to honor those who were lost. Today is a day to take a moment away from normal to remember.

I remember.

Here is what I wrote on “Sunday musings…” 10 years after 9/11. I am re-posting it today. Really, this should have been an annual thing. 9/11 was, and should continue to be, a very big deal.

1) GPS. Where were YOU? 9/11/01 is the equivalent of “Where were you when JFK was shot”, or “Where were you when Pearl Harbor was bombed?” We chatted about this at dinner chez bingo the other night. I was in the OR with a full schedule when the first plane hit. I came out in time to watch the second one hit, and then was between cases when the second building went down.

Never forget.

2) Plain talk. 9/11 is almost routinely called a tragedy, especially now, 10 years on. This is pretty much the only way I’ve seen it described in all types of media, mainstream and otherwise. Well, it is, and it isn’t.

The killings of nearly 4000 people on U.S. soil was tragic for each one of them, and truly tragic for their friends and families. But a tragedy? I say no. A tragedy implies some element of fate, something about which no single person could have stood up and prevented. Think the Tsunami in Japan. Mudslides in South America. An avalanche or wildfire out of control. THOSE are tragedies resulting in death.

No, 9/11 was filled with a tragic loss of life, but the only fate involved was so banal that if beggars the definition of fate: did you go to work that Tuesday morning? The deaths of 9/11 are the direct result of pure, unadulterated EVIL. They represent nearly 4000 killings. Purposeful killings. Mass murder perpetrated on civilians so far removed from any war zone that to even call them “non-combatants” is a meaningless over-reach. Calling 9/11 a “tragedy” cheapens the word, cheapens the loss, puts the soft glow of unavoidable fate on what was nothing of the sort.

9/11 was EVIL. Call it what is was.

3) Press “up”. Funny, after 10 years you’d think we’d have heard all of the “hero” stories by now, huh? Apparently not. Seems there were some folks who did some pretty heroic things who just never got around to telling anyone. Like those 2 Air National Guard pilots who scrambled after the plane that eventually went down in PA with UNARMED JETS. Yup. No missiles or bullets on board. They took off with complete knowledge that they would not only have to face the specter of shooting down fellow citizens, but “shooting down” actually meant using their aircraft as missiles.

It’s crazy, even after 10 years, to think of how many heroes stood before life’s elevator or stairwell and pushed “up”. Safety was “down”, out, anywhere but “up”, and yet up they went. Cops, firefighters, and two unarmed fighter pilots who just happened to be a little higher when they chose to go “up”. These men and women, on the ground floor at several Ground Zeros, have been followed honorably by thousands of other American heroes toiling anonymously, and SUCCESSFULLY, to prevent other evil doers from killing other Americans.

I’m still awestruck, 10 years on.

4) Epilogue. So, what did you take away from 9/11? Did anything change? Anything stay with you? Couple things for me. The first thing, regrettably and to my great embarrassment, is that it took a tragic event like 9/11 for me to really look at a huge swath of Americans I’d never really paid much attention to before. This would be Police Officers, Firefighters, and any variety of men and women in the Armed Forces. This was still 4+ years before I discovered CrossFit mind you, but our collective respect for, and willingness to acknowledge, these men and women is a small positive outcome that I believe persists 10 years on.

I had an epiphany of sorts 10 days after 9/11. The particular trigger (I really disliked a certain golf course) was trivial, but I was primed by 9/11 to be open to the “Aha!” moment. I discovered that the things that make me unhappy make me more unhappy than the things that make me happy, make me happy. Seems kinda simple I guess, but it was like a bolt from the blue. I realized that, once identified as such, things that made me unhappy could be avoided downstream. You don’t always get to choose only the stuff that makes you happy (Polyanna doesn’t live here anymore), and you don’t even necessarily get to always choose to avoid stuff that makes you unhappy, but it’s amazing how often you CAN if you try just a little. A life changer that I was able to notice because, well, I was thinking a whole lot about life after watching so many lose theirs.

I’m not saying that anyone else should have had this particular epiphany on or about 9/11, or ANY epiphany for that matter, but I do wonder, is there something that changed, something you’ve carried with you since that day. Since 9/11/01? 10 years on?

1 Curse. “May you live in interesting times.” Ancient Chinese curse.

It seems to me that we have always ever had only interesting times.

2 Dylan. Bob Dylan’s music comes up pretty regularly in my college group. Usually in the form of another artist’s cover. I’m continually amazed by the quality of the music as written; so many artists with manifestly greater performative talents produce vastly superior versions of Dylan’s compositions. Hendrix: All Along the Watchtower. Clapton: Don’t Think Twice. Joni Mitchell: Blowin’ in the wind. Seriously, one could go on and on. And yet their performances are but veneer laid upon a brilliant foundation.

What strikes me lately is how timeless his lyrics are. Spend a moment or two with “The Times They Are A’changin'”. Written in the mid-60’s if memory serves, and yet each stanza could easily fit on stage this weekend. Generational strife. War simmering in foreign lands. Talking heads trying to talk over our heads.

Dylan the poet is the seer of change.

3 Change. “It’s never the changes we want that change everything…”: Graffiti on the walls of a decaying office within an abandoned foundry in Cleveland, OH. (HT @ExploresMr).

Goodness, there’s an awful lot of meat on that bone.

Those of you who are longish in tooth will recall that “Sunday musings…” was born on the “pages” of the old CrossFit.com. At least once each year calls for change in some aspect of CrossFit, or perhaps the bleating of those bemoaning some change that emanated from the halls of CrossFit HQ, would finally become sufficiently loud to trigger a “musings…” about change. These protestations almost always had a particular quality to them: the viewpoint through which the conversationists wished to propose or protest change was myopic to the point of seeking/seething over change that had nanoscopic scope. There was often an almost willful naiveté. “Thus and such needs to change/should never have changed because I feel…”. You could set your watch by the timing of these conversational threads whenever change might be blowin’ in the wind.

Re-reading the scribblings of our mystery savant I can’t decide if they speak more about miss-met expectations or unintended consequences. Covers both pretty well, actually. Change always happens; change is the only constant. I’m pretty confident that our philosopher in the foundry is not lamenting some sort of stasis, some lack of change. Pretty sure they are turning a keen eye on those who are active seekers of change. Again, to CrossFit and the crescendo of demands for change that followed the founder’s ill-advised public pondering of things not necessarily CrossFit. The change that people wanted was for the culture to become more like the aspirational culture seen on the nation’s op-ed pages. It was occurring, after all, at a time of peak identity politics.

What they got, what changed everything was the culture you see on the pages of a spreadsheet during peak financial engineering.

In my day job as a practicing surgical specialist I am constantly aware of both the mis-met expectations and the unintended consequences of the creeping consolidation of services and those who provide them in our American healthcare universe. The change everyone professes to want is “universal coverage”, the universal access of every citizen to a vehicle that will pay for the healthcare they use. The changes many wish for would lead to a single source of both funding and foundational structure, the federal government. Where once more than 75% of physicians were in privately owned practices in which the employees worked for the doctor and the doctor worked for the patients, the Affordable Care Act has driven consolidation to the point where nearly 70% of physicians are employed by massive corporations, both for- and “not for-” profit. Believe it or not, this has increased the % of people who are “covered”, who have health insurance that pays for all, most, or some of their healthcare.

What changes everything turns out not to be coverage, but what this coverage-driven consolidation has done to care. Dollar-driven care changes your relationship with the people who take care of you. No longer do you actually have a relationship with the people who take care of you any more than you have a relationship with the person who checks you out at Walmart. “Coverage” that drives doctors into ever larger organizations, be they faux “non-profits” like the Mayo Clinic and its peers or ever-larger practices owned by the numbers people who run private equity investments (like CrossFit), means that your care is now provided by people who work for someone other than you. The people who support the clinics where you receive your care report to business people, not medical people. Coverage isn’t caring. Coverage is a transaction.

What changed everything was that coverage isn’t healthcare; coverage is nothing more than a transaction.

On and on it goes. Change, that is. We have actually never lived as a species in a time where there WASN’T change, although it surely seems as if there have been times when similar changes occur over and over again. Maybe the fault lies in something altogether human, our inability to distinguish the differences between that which we want and that which we need. Perhaps that’s why so many of Dylan’s lyrics seem so current despite the fact that they were written 50+ years ago.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’ (Bob Dylan)

“It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”

I’ll see you next week…