Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

There’s been lots of loss around the White family of late. Lost parents, parents soon to be lost, lost innocence, lost friends, lost trust. Tons of loss. Some of those losses are inevitable of course, but others are sadly losses born of the choices made by others. Whatever. We–you and I and our loved ones–do not get to make choices for those who come in and out of our lives. While that knowledge provides little salve for the sting of loss it at least allows us to make a clean break, to leave behind a loss after a proper amount of legitimate, honest mourning.

A problem arises when mourning is tinged with regret. This is made all the more problematic when the regret is not honest regret, when it is disingenuous, the result of a conscious decision made without any consideration of anyone other than oneself. You know how this goes. “I wish I’d visited Papa more after he got sick.” “My best job was the first one I ever had; I should have gone back and asked if I could start again.” “Man, I can’t believe ABC is closing. No place was ever as good that.” “I wonder if it would be different if I’d gone and had that beer with XYZ.”

Some regret is real. I get that. You’ve got a crappy job and you need it, and you just can’t get on a plane to see your Dad/Mom/sibling. Deep down you think you were wronged in some way at some time by somebody, that your boss/family member/friend could have been better to/for you and you had no choice but to leave the job/business/friendship. Heck, there are some families where so much toxicity is directed toward you that the only way you can remain healthy is to separate from the family. I get that, but let’s face it, stuff like that is not the norm. In most cases everyone could have tried harder, done better. Including you.

You, and I, can legitimately regret that, not trying harder.

What’s the lesson here? Well, as I said some losses are unavoidable. Death comes for us all. Miss that chance and it’s gone forever. Suck it up and spend the time BEFORE it’s time to mourn. As they say, send the flowers today; the deceased never get to see them on the altar. Likewise, the person who departs gets no satisfaction from your regret, they simply left saddened by your absence.

All the rest? Well, your choices have consequences for everyone involved. Bad or sad things are at least partly on you, and protestations of regret (Oh I wish I’d; Oh I should have) make it infinitely worse. Suck it up and own your decision. Suck it up and own the consequences. A business that depended on you folded because you left? A friendship ended because you gave up? A family less close because you were all “Cat’s in the cradle” all the time? You chose one of your ‘wants’ over some meaningful someone’s ‘need’? Saying you miss this or that about any or all of these only makes it worse. You chose to miss it.

Listen, I’ve done all of the above and properly suffered because of it. Some things are too valuable to take a chance on needing to mourn them. It’s much less painful, and much more believable, when you’ve made every effort possible to prevent a loss. Then others will believe you when you say “I miss…”

More importantly, you’ll believe it yourself.

1) Memory 1. Music is a very powerful trigger for memories, isn’t it? Driving to the barn with Beth this morning and my brother calls with a challenge: when was the first time you heard “Close to You” by the Carpenters? With just the tiniest prompt (“it was summer”) I was thrown back to age 7 or 8 and the boardwalk amusement park on the Northern Jersey shore.

We “walked along” together past the “Win an Album” wheels, “Close to You” and “American Woman” back to back for miles.

2) Memory 2. Man, the White family is just a huge bunch of Olympics junkies. On that same drive this morning I was thinking about the massive “hangover” we will all have next Sunday when our fix goes on a 2 year hiatus. Skeleton on TV, leaning over the rail with Beth, the kids and my folks watching the sleds fly by in Park City in my mind. We saw almost everything in 2002.

It’s such a pleasure to see it all again.

3) Memory 3. Sonny, one of my teammates and good friends from college called out of the blue yesterday. Seems he has decided to write a biography of his Dad (note to self: this is a great idea) and was going through old letters as part of his research. In that printed pile of memories he came across a couple of letters I sent to him while he was in Japan teaching English while he tried to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Yup. Letters. Mind you, this was in 1982. Calling Japan was expensive. No cell phones, texting, WhatsApp or Signal. A postcard from Disney World reminded me of how much fun my closest friend Rob and I had that summer. We were jewelry display repair men, traveling all over the U.S. fixing displays in places like Zayres (RIP) and Eckert Drugs. We did 5 days of work in 3 and spent the remaining time exploring whatever city we parachuted into.

Best indoor summer job ever.

4) Memory 4. Sonny also sent me a picture of a full-on letter written on airmail paper (overseas snailmail was expensive, too!) in which I gave him the play-by-play of the 1982 Williams-Middlebury football game. Middlebury is about 45 minutes south of Burlington where I went to medical school. Sonny and I had dozens of friends still playing for Williams and the “good guys” won.

But the gold in that letter was my description of my guest at the game, UVM senior Beth Hurst. Yup, my very first date with the love of my life! John could barely get the words out as he read my description of how badly I burned the scallops I made for dinner after we got back to Burlington. Pretty sure the wine had more sugar than a 12 oz. can of Sprite, too. Thankfully Beth saw past my obvious culinary limitations.

Happy Valentine’s Day Dollie!

5) Free Skate. “I blew it. When I skated on to the ice my head was filled with negative thoughts. I just blew it.” –Illia Malinin, U.S. figure skater.

Man, there have been other Olympic athletes who were considered a stone, cold lock for gold as big as young Master Malinin–Alexiev in weightlifting, Gable in wrestling, the basketball HOF-packed Dream Team, Greg Louganis in diving, every German luge team, speed skater Eric Heiden–but the list of heavy favorites who underperformed in their final appearance so badly that they performed themselves off the podium entirely is rather small. Poor Illia went from first to 8th with a score <75% of his rather mediocre (for him) team score.

No one was more shocked than Malinin.

Before I get into the meat of this let me take a moment to send out massive kudos to the 21 year old Malinin for his grace and maturity, walking over to the gold medalist and immediately congratulating him, then while handling the onslaught of questions that followed his skate. Less than 10 minutes after his performance he was interviewed by NBC and uttered the words above. No excuses. He owned his performance and admitted that he had no idea why he entered the arena with those negative thoughts as he prepared to perform.

There’s no place to hide for the solo athlete. Tennis, golf, downhill skiing, equestrian, and many others. Out there competing pretty much alone. Circumstances exist in team sports that are similar. Think penalty shots in hockey or soccer, or perhaps playing cornerback in man-to-man coverage. I definitely relate to that last one. Win with grace or own it when you are beaten. All of them have much in common with Illia Malinin.

When you enter any of those lonely arenas it’s important to enter with visions of success. Until that fateful free skate I think that was one of Malinin’s strong suits; the kid expected not just victory but dominance in the process. Error free excellence at a minimum. Imagine bounding down the length of a 3-meter springboard and thinking about slamming your head on the board as you pass it on the way down instead of a perfect entry with no splash. Planning for and playing to the thought of success rather than, as Malinin described it, inexplicable thoughts of failure.

Do you know where else this is key? Surgery. Surgery of all kinds. There are no crowds watching. Certainly no one cheers at the end of a procedure. Why? Because the expectation isn’t the overwhelming favorite in the event, the acknowledged best-in-the-world surgeon is going to ace the performance, it’s that every single “athlete” in the tournament is going to ace it. Has to ace it.

Every. Single. Time.

Every surgeon enters the OR as if they are one of those solo athletes headed into the arena or onto the ice. The mental approach is like any other “event”: you have to bury any and all negative thoughts and visualize only success. It doesn’t matter what your “event” is. Neuro, eye, cardiac, transplant surgery, it doesn’t matter. The mental approach is the same: visualize only success. Nobody bats 1.000 in anything and surgery is no different. We sometimes don’t get the results we seek on behalf of our patients because of the very nature of surgery, the complexity inherent in performing surgery where every patient is singular and unique. But surgeons walk into every OR with only visions of success.

There are no games played in the operating room.

I’ll see you next week…

“The grains of sand that pass through the funnel of life’s hourglass are only dry and colorless if they are observed from afar; up close each one is as colorful as any rainbow, as full of energy as any thunderstorm. Poetry is there for the asking.” DEW 1/16/2017.

While everyone isn’t necessarily “A” somebody, everyone is somebody who matters. My Dad was heroic in this regard. He remembered everyone. The lower on the economic food chain someone may have been, the more he remembered them. Janitors, waitresses/waiters, maintenance workers…he knew all of their names. He’d ask you about your story, ask you to describe the grains of sand in your hourglass, and if you told him he remembered. Dad would be dumbfounded by the denigration of these and other physical jobs so prevalent on mainstream media and other outlets.

Dad had a way with frontline workers. It was natural, a gift for sure, but he obviously worked at it, too. Did you have a problem getting THAT gift this year? Turns out, that’s not a new phenomenon caused by “COVID-related supply chain issues.” My Dad had a coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) in 1985 at the peak of the Cabbage Patch Doll craze. Somehow he found a Cabbage Patch Doll for every nurse in the Coronary ICU to thank them for their care.

So what’s the point? It shouldn’t take a pandemic that interrupts every aspect of everyday life for us to notice the folks who aren’t anywhere near the top of the economic food chain. CEO’s saved the world in the early parts of the pandemic (Sunday NYT)? Bullshit. Company X allowed the economy to survive because it made “stay at home” work possible? Yeah, that’s bullshit, too. The person who answers the phone in my office or the person driving the garbage trucks had just as much impact as that self-satisfied CEO who’s biggest sacrifice was skipping Davos this year.

There’s no such thing as a small life. Each life is full, vibrant, colorful, and important. Each little grain of sand flowing through the hourglass is as meaningful as the next.

It’s been years since my Dad died and yet I return to his lessons on a daily basis. I see him talking to the guy who swept the floors in the factory. There his is, sitting down to lunch with a banker. If I close my eyes and just listen to the personal banter it’s hard to figure out which is which. The sands of time that flowed for each looked the same to my Dad. He heard the poetry, saw the beauty. My Dad made every life he touched bigger.

Everyone was a somebody.

An imaginary letter to an imaginary advice columnist about something that may or may not have happened…

Dear Arthur,

Boy, does this feel strange. I’m the guy who folks of all ages, types and sizes come to for advice. My sole goal, the thing that approaches every conscious decision I make is to speak and listen, act and react from a place of kindness and, if possible, love. Yet here I am, silently frozen out of a friendship more than 20 years in the making for a presumed act of disloyalty. I got caught in a picture that I tried very hard to avoid being caught in, and before I could untag myself my friend caught sight of it on some social media thing or another.

Even the mailman was puzzled by the stamp on my returned Christmas card: “Delivery Refused”.

My sin was to do something kind for another friend entirely. I accepted their invitation to a gathering where I would know many people; my attendance would be very welcomed by everyone there, and the friend who invited me would likely garner some goodwill for having me there. One of the other guests who I once knew quite well but hadn’t really had contact with for more than 8 years had caused great harm to my out-of-town friend, someone who I try to be in touch with several times each year.

With the exception of the time I spent with my hosts, locals we try to hang out with, the gathering was rather awkward and uncomfortable for me. I left after a short stay; the only goodbyes I said were to my hosts. Still, just for being there it appears as if my long-time friend has decided to end our friendship over a picture on the internet. Our last interaction was a two sentence exchange on that social media site in which I explained the invitation.

Since I have enjoyed this friendship a part of me feels compelled to explain. At the same time the reaction to the picture seems so outsized I am left to wonder if doing so will matter.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

What an odd world we live in! Once upon a time you had to almost work at it to offend someone face to face, or at least via a phone call or personal letter in order to get put in the eternal friendship penalty box. Now? Apparently all you have to do is show up in a random picture somewhere online without any context. Rough place, that internet.

I get it, though. Judging by your somewhat cryptic letter something really lousy must have happened to your out-or-town friend at the hands of the other invited guest. You accepted the invitation from your local friends because, well, they’re your friends, too. You seem to have made an effort to be electronically invisible but got photographed anyway. Perhaps you were momentarily distracted and didn’t want to cause discomfort for your hosts by more aggressively declining the photo. You say that you aim to be kind in your interactions. It is understandable that the “here and now” of the gathering was the stronger influence.

So what now? You feel badly. Your out-of-town friendship must be very meaningful. I mean, you and your mailman looked carefully enough at the returned letter to see the “why” on the envelope. As I see it there are two ways you can look at this. You can paraphrase the American philosopher Elbert Bubbard: “Never explain. Your friends do not need it, and [everyone else] will not believe it.” Do you think a more in-depth explanation than your quick SM interchange will make a difference?

Or we can channel another Philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr: “No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.” Perhaps, upon reflection your friend will realize the value of your friendship, and upon doing so will recall your basic nature. Your tendency to kindness. And having done so will forgive you for the pain you unintentionally and unknowingly caused.

To each other.

With best wishes, Arthur

I’ll see you next week…