Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1 Time. For a guy who has been told, and who really does believe that he needs to find some hobbies so that he isn’t bothering the people around him who already have, I certainly seem to run out of time awfully frequently. Like, every day frequently.

Clue? It’s been three weeks since I’ve “mused”.

2 Spam. Not gonna lie, the bots are winning. Big time. It’s tough to filter out an email address when the bot has 50, or 100,000 or a million different versions of an address from which to bludgeon your email. My spam filters on email are nearly worthless.

It’s almost bad enough that you wanna find out just what it is that all of those “sexy Russian girls” find so fascinating about a slightly chubby, easily winded middle-aged man.

3 Fat. Man, I’m tired of being soft. Sure, there are a couple of very good reasons for these extra 8 or 10 pounds of marshmallow. 5 or so months of pre-surgical pain that prevented me from doing even the most minimal of physical activity, including walking. 4 months of post-op pain after I got my hip fixed. Not gonna lie, the miss-met expectations after surgery put me in a pretty dark and foul place.

Now? I am weak as a kitten and starting back at the whole fitness thing with less strength in my anything than at any time in my life with the exception of my teenage recovery from a broken back. While I am no longer in a dark place, let’s just say that this lack of fitness (and associated hurt caused by the pursuit to regain some modicum of the same) occasionally leaves me in a black mood. All exposed nerves and impatience. The sight of my well-cushioned navel unintentionally exposed when I reached up and my tee shirt ran out of cover almost cost me a full-length mirror.

Good thing I couldn’t bend down to grab a shoe.

4 Safety. “Keep children ‘safe enough’ rather than ‘as safe as possible’.” –Mikki Martin. Supportive reading: Outside Magazine article on raising children outdoors in Norway.

Mikki and her husband Jeff are the founders of the original CrossFit Kids program. There are many things tragic about the demise of the original company we knew as CrossFit, Inc., but for my mind none greater than the dissolution of the bond between the Martins and their creation, CFK. Fitness and the training of children in effective functional movement is fundamentally different than doing so in adults. Literally everything about it is different; the Martins cracked the code and brought what you could think of as Physical Fitness v2.0 to the masses. You can find them and v3.0 of their creation by looking for The Brand X Method.

Many parents would read Mikki’s quote and be appalled. Who in their right mind wouldn’t do literally everything possible to keep their children safe, right? But that creates more than a little bit of a problem if your ultimate goal is to raise a healthy, fit, creative and resilient kid. I mean, come on, the whole “as safe as possible” thing has brought us a couple of generations of kids who have no idea what “monkey bars” are. Climb a tree? No need to worry about some cranky old guy yelling “get off my lawn” when a panicked parent has hauled their budding climber off the maple tree before they were high enough to do a pull-up.

There is an extraordinary young woman, mother of 5 or 6 if memory serves, who was once one of my older son’s close friends. She would come over to our house, partly because she and Dan were buds but really, if she was being honest, because Beth let them play in the dirt. Or the mud, maybe with a little mudpie consumption. Or in a gently flowing stream, perhaps washing down that mudpie with a sip. All of which would be anathema to the “as safe as possible” crowd of course, notwithstanding the research showing that all of the above leads to healthier, happier kids.

Likewise, organized sports and other athletic activities. Here I will admit that I am conflicted, almost paralyzed in fact by my aversion to the wanton head trauma that seems so prevalent in all of the so-called “helmet” sports, including the beloved football of my youth. But even if we exclude them there are still risks involved in literally every physical activity in which our kids will participate. Do you know what the most dangerous sport is in terms of injuries? Hint: it isn’t a helmet sport. It’s actually baseball. More injuries, indeed, more deaths than any other junior sport. Care to guess what the safest is? Yup…a tie between strength training and functional fitness programs like TBXM in children as young as 8.

We should let our kids be kids. Explore. Try some stuff that may not turn out like riding a horse or trying to “ollie” a skateboard. Climb a set of monkey bars or see if you can traverse that horizontal ladder when your feet are hanging a yard or so above the ground. Ride your bike to school. Jump in that big pile of leaves that Mom or Dad dumped just on this side of the street. Grab that sunfish and try to get the hook out. Play in the dirt and dig up some worms.

Nobody ever died from tasting a worm to see why the fish seem to like them so much.

5 Microstress. Four clicks. That’s all it took. Four additional clicks added to the process of putting in a post-op order after surgery without any warning or explanation. 11 seconds of additional work on top of the tripling of the time taken to paperwork my way out of the OR necessitated by the advent of EMR. That’s all it took. Why? Why did we have to add this duplication of stuff that was already accounted for? Four clicks and I was literally enraged.

Four additional clicks pretty much defines the “micro” in “microstress”.

All of my reserves were depleted. There was no room for, well, anything else. I like to think of myself as possessing three distinct, finite “spaces” that encompass my daily lived experience. Timespace is easy: how many minutes I have over the course of my waking day to accomplish whatever it is that I need or want to accomplish. Brainspace is a little more complex: the amount of “carrying capacity” I have in my brain for the combination of accessible information storage and “computational” power to apply to the memory I am carrying in my RAM, so to speak. Lastly is Emotionalspace, the most complex of them all. This describes where I am on the proverbial “happy <-> sad” scale, my emotional resilience (how likely I am to be able to withstand negative events or vibes), and my emotional carrying capacity or empathy.

In my mind I see these three spaces as buckets, each a particular size at any given moment, and each filled to a level that corresponds to whatever state in which I find myself and the world around me. Timespace is mostly fixed of course; my bucket can never hold more than 24 hours worth of minutes. I only get to determine how many of them I’ll be awake to use. Both BrainSpace and EmotionalSpace are more elastic. There are some days when it seems like I can bring up any fact or notion I’ve ever acquired, and then work it effectively to carry out whatever task I’ve been presented. The BrainSpace bucket just seems a bit bigger sometimes. So, too, the EmotionalSpace bucket. There are days when I am just feeling on top of the world. I’m happy, and happy to spread some of my joy. I can withstand the emotional currents, both internal and external, that buffet each of us as we sail along. On days like this my EmotionalSpace bucket is as big as a swimming pool. On others it is quite the opposite; each tiny bit of negativity goes into bucket that shrinks with every passing minute.

Until four additional clicks, four tiny drops cause one or two or all three of my buckets to overflow.

That’s when stuff gets dicey, when the buckets overflow. It’s rather rare that you wake up with huge buckets, with all of your spaces sitting there and all kinds of volume available like so much space on a hard drive, and something comes along that floods one or more, producing what we might call “acute stress”. Chronic stress is what brings most of us down. The accumulation of tiny microtraumas, little moments of tension, discord or anxiety over time. A continuous flow of tiny drops filling up your buckets.

My Mom isn’t doing all that well in her retirement facility, a situation that produces a chronic drip that fills all three of my buckets. A kind of background stress. I barely know it’s there most of the time, but that’s a part of why stuff like that is so insidious and therefore dangerous. Unlike the tsunami that will ensue when Mom eventually passes away, the daily drip, the microstress of having her be less than well slowly fills my buckets and leaves less room for, well, everything else.

We each live our lives in a constant state of filling and emptying our buckets. “Burnout”, the inability to roll with the mundane in our lives, occurs when one or all of our buckets is so full that a single additional drop affects us as if it was that tsunami above. My buckets were so full from microstraumas like my Mom’s situation that the surprise addition of four clicks after surgery brought me to a place of injury no less hurtful than if I’d gotten there all at once; once there it doesn’t matter if it was four drops or from a veritable shower of challenge or trauma. Either way, you’ve entered the burn-out zone. I knew I was close; the “empty space” above the water in my buckets is where patience and empathy live and I’d been getting short of both. As it turned out, the surprise addition of four clicks on top of all of the other clicks it took to paperwork my way out of the OR was at least one drop too many.

Understanding burnout, understanding stress and stressors both micro and macro and how it all affects each of us, means understanding that the breaking point is more often a tiny drop into a bucket filled to the brim, with no space left above to breath.

1 Vacation. Slept in yesterday. Took a walk. Had a drink. Declined to open up my laptop and type. The dogs napped.

We let them lie.

Here is a vacation edition of “Sunday musings…” with a couple of lightly edited entries from Easter weekends past.

2 Role model. It’s Easter Sunday, the holiest day in the Christian year, falling this year during both Passover and Ramadan. As Christians we “celebrate” the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate expression of altruism in the “history” of mankind. Men and women are tasked with following Him as the ultimate role model for how we are to live our lives.

If one does, indeed, believe, and if one does follow Him as the role model in one’s life, then all other talk of role models is irrelevant. Like so many other goals and targets, though, the Lamb as role model is ultimately unachievable by any and all, and thus we have the all too human phenomenon of other, human role models.

What then constitutes a role model? Who is qualified to fill this role? Who would be willing to do so? How do we find these people, these role models?

In a world that was much less heterogenous, where people of all stripes had more in common than not and acknowledged that fact, role models seemed to be a little easier to come by. Audie Murphy. Stan Musial. Jackie Robinson. Heck, even a politician or two filled the bill. Every town had a teacher or a coach or a cop who everyone looked up to. Why then and not now? Partly because of that sense that we were all more the same than less, but partly because we only knew the good stuff about our role models, and on top of that we only really wanted to know the good stuff, ya know?

Once upon a time to be a role model meant to be always trying to do the right thing for the right person at the right time. We forgave the occasional slip because we saw the effort and appreciated the ongoing effort. It inspired us to do better ourselves. We forgave the occasional failure because we knew how hard it is to always look to do that favor, to offer the helping hand, to put forth the best effort. Our sense of our own humanity was extended to our role models as a gift to them such that they would continue to lead us.

The perceived lack of role models in society today says more about us than it does about any role models that we may have and ignore, or have and have discarded. We accentuate our differences rather than our commonalities, no matter how far on either end of the curve lie those differences. We not only accept too much information about our all too human potential role models, we actively seek the “smoking gun” that will bury them. We are all the lesser for all of that, for we deny ourselves the potential that could come from having a role model just a little bit better than ourselves. Someone to look up to, perhaps to guide us, or at the least provide us a living example of how we might be even just a bit better at the task of being human.

In our world of imperfect humans we will ultimately fail in any search for a role role model living unblemished among us, for the only perfect role model, at least in the Christian world, continues to set an unachievable goal, however noble might be our efforts today.

And He has been dead for some 2000 years now.

3 Death. Death continues to stalk our Clan. This makes us no different from Clan You; death comes for us all. Rare among us is the one who knows when the knock will come. Yet come it will. Beth’s Uncle, the last remaining of either side of the previous generation of her bloodline, resides at the moment in an ICU. It comes for those of every age. A year ago it came for a work world friend’s son. Seven years ago yesterday it came for a little girl who was a part of our horse world, taken at 12, alone in the gloaming, an unseen calamity leaving behind, well, everything and everyone. In this there is nothing special about our family. It is simply our time, our turn for Death to stalk our circle. Death takes us all, and we have very little choice about when it will inevitably come for us.

Life, though, is a very different thing entirely. Life, you see, can be taken by the reins and ridden for all its worth. We need not sit back and let life come to us like a horse at the far end of the field. It may, come for us that is, but it just as well may not. Like that horse, though, we can go right over and get it, hop on, and ride like hell. That’s the beauty of life. Of living. Being alive is a full-contact participatory sport. Every day you get to wake up is just chockablock filled with literally herds of horses just there for the riding. Some days you’re ready for literally anything and it’s off after that fire-breathing stallion and a gallop for the ages. Others, it’s all you can do to pull yourself into the creaky old saddle of an ancient herdy-gerdy pony barely able to put one foot ahead of the other. No matter. You’re alive. You woke up again and you looked into that pasture at all of those horses, chose one, and started to ride.

Death may indeed be stalking us, stalking you and me, but today is not our day. Uh uh, not today. Today we are alive. We are surrounded by our people, here and everywhere. Our circle is full. Today you have your people, and your people have you. This is not a day to be “not dying”, this is a day to be living. Choose a horse. Take the reins.

For today, we ride.

I hope you enjoyed my little vacation “look back”. I’ll see you next week…

1 Fools. April Fools Day brought a very funny gag from my past. Supposedly Williams College and our arch rivals Amherst were merging, becoming Wamherst.

Easiest AFD joke to suss out in history.

2 Plural. Sometimes I struggle with spelling. English is an odd language, eh? Today it was the plural of “journey”. I kept trying to put an “ies” in place of the “y”.

Actually had to look it up to realize is was a simple “s”. Doh.

3 Offended. “Second hand offended”: to be offended on someone else’s behalf, whether or not they, themselves, are offended at all. Seems to be a major source of fuel for the interactive social media market. HT “Lovely Daughter” Megan.

There just isn’t enough time or energy to partake in this, at least for me. In my effort to optimize my various reasons to be offended (see below) I just can’t fit in any dose of offense on behalf of someone else at all.

4 Message. “Turn your mess into your message”. –Julie Walker, founder of the Peyton Walker Foundation.

My friend Julie lost her daughter to a cardiac condition almost 10 years ago. To honor Peyton’s brief but extraordinarily wonderful life Julie and the rest of the Walker family founded a charitable foundation dedicated to the twin goals of screening to diagnose cardiac conditions that pre-dispose to sudden cardiac death, and to donate AED’s to schools and other organizations so that they might have the means to save a life in one so afflicted. Very cool, very strong stuff, that.

A tip of the hat to Julie and her family. I’m gonna steal that quote but you can bet I’ll be giving attribution, Julie.

5 Optimization. Some time ago I wrote about the Minimum Effective Dose (MED), the concept in which we seek to optimize our results with the smallest amount of whatever it is that we are using to achieve that outcome. The quest to find the MED is one that crosses quite easily between my day job (medical) and my own quest for health. A quick mention of Eva T in Outside magazine and the program she uses with her clients made me think a bit more on the MED. Robb Wolf, one of the most knowledgeable nutrition experts on the face of the Earth, linked a Tweet today to another trainer who proposes that low-intensity aerobic exercise is the only thing that has ever been shown to postpone mortality. Big shift for Robb given his legacy involvement with CrossFit, the ultimate high-intensity program, and given the “slow” part of aerobic fitness programs, one that puts pressure on the quest for MED. The Everyday Math column in the WSJ provided an enhanced vocabulary for the journey.

Sometimes the MED really is a “something” you take. Here one thinks of medicine or food, for example. It is astonishing how many viewpoints there are on the topic of daily protein intake, for example. More often is the case that we are looking at a dose of time or effort. Or perhaps both. In this case we are seeking to optimize the effort as it relates to the outcome, to make the value of outcome divided by effort as large as possible. In healthcare “Effort” includes not only the number or test you get or pills you take, but also such things as time devoted to stuff like insurance forms and the figurative effort of reaching into your wallet to pay for medicine. The rate limiting factor is the Law of Diminishing Returns, of course: at some point additional effort produces such a small incremental increase in the outcome that it becomes not worth making. This applies to everything from workouts/week (or day) to decorating a birthday cake. At a certain point you just have to feel you’ve succeeded.

How, then, to know when you have reached this optimal level? Eugenia Cheng, the mathematician who wrote the WSJ piece, offers the concept of the “minimal acceptable standard”. Once she has reached this outcome the additional effects garnered from more effort have moved beyond the point where Diminishing Returns kicks in and she simply accepts the outcome. We would call these “minimal standards” goals, but the concept is essentially the same. We want an outcome; setting a target or a goal is step one in optimization.

Cheng then goes on to refine optimization with a discussion about boundaries. One is your goal, of course. In real life others also exist, things like a 24 hour day and a 7 day week and the need to make a living. The dose you choose, both qualitatively (what it is) and quantitatively (how much you get) is unavoidably affected by boundary conditions over which you have less control. In the end no outcome worth achieving happens without effort. Health, friendship, or the unraveling of a gnarly math problem–you’re going to put effort in to get your results out.

Maximizing your outcome-to-effort ratio is just another way to say you are seeking your Minimum Effective Dose, in fitness, health and elsewhere. Doing so in any one domain necessarily leaves you the resources/time to do the same in many more or the other domains in your life.

I’ll see you next week…

1 Spring. As in “spring ahead” and change all of your clocks to Daylight Savings Time, one hour LATER than this time yesterday.

Did I read somewhere that this is the last time that we will ever do this in the U.S.? That EST is now EDT? Forever?

2 Umbraphile. Lover of shadows. A belated RIP to Jay Pasachoff, beloved professor of Astronomy at my Alma Mater Williams College and perhaps the world’s expert on solar eclipses. Jay was a particular favorite of athletes at Williams (“Stars for A bars), and the feeling was mutual. The holder of the world record for most solar eclipses witnessed, he was famous for taking students and alums along for the ride as he chased the sun around the globe.

Sadly he will miss the next big eclipse which is set to take place in 2024. Let’s hope that the good folks in Sinaloa, Mexico are able to safely welcome Jay’s fellow umbraphiles as they congregate in his memory.

3 Monk. Malachy McCourt is 91 years old. Younger brother of Frank, he of “Angela’s Ashes” fame, Malachy was most famous for being a raconteur/n’ere-do-well who ran in the original Rat Pack circles. His memoir, “A Monk Swimming”, remains one of the funniest reads of my life. I vividly remember reading it on a plane, every five minutes bursting out laughing and wiping tears out of my eyes so that I could continue. My seat mates thought I was nuts.

Having outlived his siblings and pretty much all of the running mates of his younger years, McCourt will hold a lonely court this Friday in NYC at the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. HT to the NYT for reminding me how much I liked his book; I think I’ll pick it up again, if for nothing else than to read once again where he got the title for his book.

Think “Hail Mary”.

4 Cool Adjacent. My “Lovely Daughter” Megan once described the three versions of her Dad. “Work Dad” was pretty intense. Not a whole lot of fun most of the time. “CrossFit Dad” was cool. I always got a kick out of it when she added “who thought a Dad could be cool?!” I am now “Lake Dad”. All chill. A different kind of cool.

I love this phrase, “cool adjacent”. For the most part that probably describes any phases in my life when someone might have used “cool” to describe me. Yes, I was deeply involved in CrossFit for some 13 or 14 years, and I certainly circulated in the same air as the truly cool among the CrossFit crowd both locally and nationally. Not unlike where I fit in with my professional colleagues on a national level now, what I really was, and likely am, is cool-adjacent. I fit comfortably near the cool kids or the cool stuff, and by and large they are comfortable with me in the vicinity. If I am being honest, despite my darling daughter’s lovely description, I’ve always been just a bit too old, or young, or whatever, to really, truly be cool.

But that’s OK. I’m happy to be in the neighborhood.

5 Level. As in level setting. As in I am so sore from three workouts over the last four days that it’s embarrassing. Mind you, these workouts were nothing like my prior CrossFit WODs, the things I wrote so much about when “Sunday musings…” was a part of my CrossFit experience. It’s the CrossFit Open season right now and even though my Coach is a very experienced CrossFit trainer and Box owner (hi Bill!) trust me, I am doing nothing of the sort.

What I am doing now is struggling to find my level.

I came across a quote a bit ago–I wish I could remember whose it is so I could give credit–that applies here. At least as far as my hobbies and other avocations are concerned. “It’s OK to not be too good at something that you like to do.” This does not apply to your job, of course. Especially if you have a job like my day job. There’s no way around it there; if you do the kind of thing that I do for a living you gotta be more than good, and you have to be more than good all of the time. This isn’t about what you have to do, though. This is about something that you simply choose to do because you like doing it.

Think golf. Or dressage like Beth. We watched a really cool documentary series on Disney+ last week called “Chasing Waves” about a group of young surfers shooting for Olympic medals or trying to make a living as “Free Surfers”. What interested me the most was the older surfers, the pioneers long past any aspirations for their surfing, who nonetheless headed to the beach at every opportunity. Each one admitted at some point that they weren’t really all that good anymore, at least in comparison to what they recalled as their competitive peak.

No matter. They were good enough.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time and wasted a bazillion electrons trying to figure out what will occupy my time as I eventually move on from that day job of mine. To be honest, I’ve struggled with the whole “not as good as I once was” thing with stuff like golf. It used to be a kick aiming for PR’s during my peak CF days. Even though it wasn’t really anywhere near any kind of elite level, deadlifting more than 2X my bodyweight at age 55 was a kick. Raising my lifting PR’s and lowering the times on benchmark WOD’s like “Fran” was for awhile my version of Beth’s progress up the dressage ladder of levels. Even though I was really and truly doing CF as a means to an end, elevated fitness as a way to be better at life in general, it just felt good to keep getting better.

But that’s all over now, and that’s OK. Exercise is just that, a means to an end with no aspect of “getting good”. I am working out, and putting up with the above-mentioned soreness, so that I can pursue a couple of things that I like to do. Now that I am past both of my hip replacements (and the ambush carried out by my TFL and IT Band after the last one), it’s time to get back to things I do just for fun. Because of the pain I never got up on a paddleboard last summer. Not once. I’m not all that good at the SUP thing, but I sure like being on a board. My functional workouts will hopefully get me back on a board, or back in a kayak.

Probably not getting up on a surfboard, but that’s OK.

The concept of not being all that good will be a bit more challenging, and the process of level setting much more complex with the activity that is most likely to be the most fun: golf. Not because I will be able to regain some semblance of the level I once enjoyed. That particular golf cart has sailed. Nope, what I need to do is to get to a level of “good enough” to be able to enjoy the best part of golf at my stage of life: playing golf with other golfers who really like being on a golf course. The reality is, you have to be at least a little bit good at those things you like to do, and on the golf course there is a certain level I’ll have to work to get to in order to be able to achieve my goal of being in those foursomes of guys who are doing what they like to do, however “not too good” we all may be at doing it.

So it’s off to the indoor range after my sessions on the C2 bike and rower, my muscles still trembling a bit from the sneaky-hard work my buddy Bill is getting me to do. The Orange Whip and Speed Sticks my brother insisted I buy last year are waiting their turn in the leveling process (gotta clear out some space in the garage), all part of the price I am willing to pay for the privilege of not being very good at something I know I like to do. And who knows, perhaps allowing myself to just like what it is I’m doing, however good I am or how good I’m not, will make it easier for me to find a couple of other things I can like to do. I mean, it may not be all that good to become very good at my latest discovery.

Have I told you yet about how much I’ve been learning about the world of rum?

I do like doing these “musings”, no matter how good or not good I am at it, so I’ll see you next week…

“You want to escape winter and you are looking at a map Quebec City? The weather app says it’s zero degrees there!” “Now you know why I prefer looking at paper maps.” –Frazz

“The map is not the same as the territory.” Ray Nayla, The Mountain in the Sea

Beth and I have just returned from an adventure in south Florida experienced in two parts. We followed Hero, Beth’s epic dressage horse, as he spent a part of “Season”, as the Floridians call it, in the equestrian mecca that is Wellington. When folks asked me where I was headed I told them that Beth was following her horse, and I was following my Beth! In truth, absent Hero and our friends who train both him and Beth, Wellington holds very little of interest for me.

Which is why I make it a point to talk to strangers there whenever I can.

Do you do this? Talk to strangers? I make a special point to do this all the time, but I make a particular effort when I am far afield from my home coordinates. Whether playing at home or away, talking to strangers puts me in “the territory” rather than simply placing me on a map. I’m pretty good at it, actually. Likely due to the potent combination of both nature and nurture at home (my mother is famous for chatting up literally any poor soul who is even momentarily motionless in her vicinity) and the necessity of doing so on the daily at work (I am a physician who sees dozens of patients each day). Breaking the ice and starting a conversation is second nature, and thankfully I have a keen sense that alerts me when a stranger (or I) might wish to remain strangers.

We chatted up any number of strangers over our 2+ weeks in Florida. Have you ever flown Allegiant? They don’t have a bulkhead on the port side in the front of the bus. This left us sitting knee to knee with the flight attendants on the way up and down. One of them literally couldn’t make eye contact, either with us or their teammates; no chatting there. On the other hand we did get some giggles out of the other flight attendant. She sent us off with a huge smile and best wishes for the trip ahead. Friendly banter with the rental car garage attendants resulted in two super-sized upgrades.

We spent just a little bit of extra time with every single person who responded to tiny bits of outreach. I thought I was educating the seemingly pushy owner of a surf shop who was trying to sell me a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses (we sell more of these than anyone else in Cleveland). While discussing the fact that thus far it is a physical impossibility to make a clear, un-tinted polarized lens we discovered that he is actually a particle physicist on break from Berkeley filling in for family. We looked him up on Google Scholar; he’s the real deal! Maybe my poking at his sales pitch will turn into an idea that benefits anyone who ever struggled with glare while driving at night.

A waitress in Stuart was so excited to tell us about the hidden gems in her town that she wrote down her “must see” list on the back of the proverbial napkin. Her highlight was “Blowing Rocks”, a natural phenomenon at the local beach where the incoming tide, aided by a favorable wind, sends water through porous beach rocks and creates a kind of surging geyser. Very cool. The owner of a tack shop we visited for an “emergency” equipment fix spent 33 years in Oklahoma trying to move back to NY. Banter with her about “fraidy pits” led to a side trip to the local Italian deli for lunch on a day when we were at risk of defaulting to Subway. I literally bumped into a woman pouring coffee in the French bistro where we got breakfast each morning. Her accent said Massachusetts; sure enough, she was from Worcester. When I told her I was from Southbridge she asked if I was French. I sent her off giggling with my Mass/Rhody/Canuck patois ringing in her ears.

But it was two more significant instances of “talking with strangers” that really made the second leg of our Florida adventures memorable. Our outbound departure was kind of a disaster. I knew that my back tires needed to be replaced. It was my plan to do it in the beginning of the week when we returned. Honest! Really, I was. So of course we had a blow-out on the way to the airport. Thankfully it happened about 200 yards from an exit on the highway, and we limped into a gas station/convenience store right across the street from the off ramp. Out comes a stranger, a young man in a pulled-up hoody, who looked over and asked if we were OK.

Turns out he was a tire mechanic! More than that, he is a tire mechanic who talks to strangers. Here we were with a totally flat tire, 35 or so miles from home and still 15 miles from the airport. Now, anyone who knows Beth is assuming that she was just gonna change that tire, impressing the crap out of that tire mechanic along the way. Of course she was. She can do pretty much anything. Except that our car doesn’t have a spare since it is shod with “run-flat” tires. Even Beth had no idea what that really meant. Our new friend the tire mechanic pulled an air compressor that you plug into your car and tried to pump nus up. No love. An inspection of the tire revealed a tear the the sidewall/tread junction. So it was 15 miles of back roads at 35 miles and hour (the run-flats supposedly will go for 50 at 50mph) with the blessing of the stranger/expert who was willing to talk with us.

And if we hadn’t gotten on that plane we never would have struck up a conversation with Max!

Meeting Max was a classic in the “talking with strangers” canon. Anyone who reads my drivel (or who followed my adventures “Drinking with John Starr” on Facebook) knows that I have a ton of fun with wine and spirits. I also have this little quirk, always on the lookout for something new, and preferably different from what everyone else might be drinking. Anyway, there we were at the festival that is Total Wine and More in Wellington, a store so fabulously stocked with spirits unobtainable in Ohio that we make an annual pilgrimage. We were there to pick up the ingredients for a cocktail to accompany that evening’s crab fest, and I planned to seek out a couple of prized, “can’t get ’em” aged rums.

Which is where Max came into the picture. One of the store managers suggested a couple of his favorite rums and offered us a taste. Max tagged along and proceeded to give a 3 minute master class in tasting rum. The fact that I agreed with his off-the-cuff tasting notes as he eviscerated the poor manager’s suggestions prompted me to invite him back to the rum aisle to review my purchases and make suggestions. It turns out that his entire career has been in the spirits industry specializing in rum. It’s a rather longish story from here, but the Reader’s Digest version is that he changed half of my selections at Total, and then hunted down 3 gems for us while he was shopping for himself in Miami the next day. Oh yeah, and when he delivered them to our VRBO he brought along all of the fixin’s and made us one of the best Mai Tai’s Beth and I have ever had!

The moral of this story is easy and it is obvious: a map is nothing more than the “where” of where you are going. What makes being there worth the trip is the “who” that you encounter once you’ve arrived. The adventure of actually being in the places you see on the map more often than not begins with, or is certainly much more interesting, when you talk to strangers. It’s easy, and it’s fun. Tonight we will make a Mai Tai, raise our glass, and offer a hearty toast to Max and the other strangers to whom we talked, and who helped make our trip an adventure.

I’ll see you next week…

1 Flies. “Like flies on shit.” At the moment I am at a horse barn, my GPS coordinates for at least the morning for a week.

Do the math.

2 Trace. A beaten path or small road; a track. More in a moment.

3 Mews. A row or street of houses or apartments that have been converted from stables or built to look like former stables.”An eighteenth-century mews”. Wait for it…

4 Road. Or street. What everyone in North America calls a thoroughfare. Everyone, that is, except the supremely affected class in Wellington Florida, winter home to fancy horses and the people who fancy that owning said horseflesh makes them, you know, fancy. Don’t they remember that a classic eighteenth century mews in the Uk was literally awash in shite?

No matter how fancy those horses are, or how fanciful you may believe naming your streets with names that conjure up images of a bucolic countryside and yourself landed gentry, cruising the various traces and mews in town, the lineage of these words includes bountiful amounts of horse shit.

5 AI. There is a new player, a new candidate for the force behind the next major disruption along the timeline of human intellectual evolution. Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the guise of pseudo-autonomous bots is being heralded as the vanguard of this next major step. As an aside, I hesitate to call it a “leap” given that the “intelligence” involved isn’t really human. As a matter of fact, the computer scientists and engineers who have developed the “machine learning” that has spawned this phenomenon admit that they really have no idea how it is that these AI programs work.

Imagine that. You’ve created something which is very likely the next step along the timeline that began with the drawings of cavemen, on to papyrus and the written word, through the invention of the printing press, radio, and television, and most recently the internet (and specifically internet search which makes almost all knowledge findable), and you don’t know how it works. All of these steps brought about the liberation of information, each subsequent one increasing the access to information to a greater and larger slice of humanity. Indeed, the printing press likely did more to topple the prevailing hierarchies of the day than anything before or since. Anyone living along a trace who could read now had the same access as all of the lords and ladies living above those mews.

Here is what I wrote about the internet’s effect, further driving down the barriers to information, and what this has done to the intellectual processes of a typical human, as I mused about why I muse:

“Why do I write? Why do I sit down and use time that could otherwise be put to use in the gym, or in the office, or even just hanging with the Man Cub? As a long-standing lover of language I am always on the lookout for the best vocabulary to explain concepts I sometimes struggle with. “Offloading” is a term that is used in this case to describe what it is that humans do with information that they do not need to keep on hand in “useful memory” space.

This is what I do with ideas when my “wetware” memory is full. This is hardly new. Indeed, the sturm und drang associated with the mega-trends in education, etc. associated with our massive information/recall apparatus that is the internet actually has its origin in the Greek era of Socrates and the transition from an oral tradition to one in which teachings were written. (HT to Frank Wilczek). Prominent adherents to the oral tradition such as Socrates and Simonides argued forcefully that the advent of the written transfer of information would weaken the mind and produce an inferior type of intelligence. In a fascinating and delicious ironic twist, all we know of either of these men we know because someone else wrote down what they recalled hearing.

In my day job we are still encased in a paradigm in which information is transferred from teacher to student and then tested to see if that information has been committed to memory. Imagine, with the explosion of data now available in the world of medicine we test (and test, and test…) both new doctors and established ones to see if they remember a certain percentage of facts, regardless of how often those facts come into play in the act of practicing medicine. A CrossFit analogy is to test a trainer on the precise moment that the obturator engages in the deadlift. One neither needs to know this to teach the deadlift, nor does one need to have memorized this in order to have it on hand in the gym. So, too, in medicine.

Please don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy knowing a bunch of stuff and being able to call up that stuff without needing to use my Google-Fu. The reality is that we have made a move from memory in written form to memory in digital form that is just as profound and disruptive as that from oral to written. We have only to remember where it is we have stored our memories, our books and our music and our musings.

And our passwords. We still need to remember our passwords.”

What, then, of AI? It surely seems as if it’s more than a simple repository of information or a new way to share that information. Or maybe, not.

As I understand it, the AI that we are seeing in ChatGPT does little more than mine our existing cache of knowledge and then regurgitate it in a way that mimics what we humans do when we are in possession of a tiny slice of that knowledge. More that that, ChatGPT is capable of discerning the patterns of an INDIVIDUAL human, then to respond to a prompt in a manner which is consistent with how that human, or “kind of” human might respond. Want a picture in the manner that one would expect from Salvador Dahli? Sure. Piece of cake. Here you go. How about a Shakespearean sonnet, pegged to any time in recorded history? What the heck…make it in the style of Ben Affleck and give ChatGPT a chance to woo JLo. Again, piece of cake.

But is that a form of intelligence? A kind of “mind” capable of something truly original? Or even an original thought or concept which is derivational from something prior, as is much of what we consider conceptual development? I’m saying “no”.

The potential for this particular form of faux AI is that is has provides the possibility of relieving the role of humans from a very large percentage of tasks presently requiring “wetware”. Customer service. The process of registering for pretty much any service imaginable (e.g. medical). It can provide a probabilistic answer to an almost immeasurable number of tasks. For example, in my world of medicine this type of AI could be used to force the use of algorithmic protocols, albeit using the best of knowledge available as well as probabilistic (Baye’s Theorem) methods in coming to suggested diagnoses and treatments. After all, it’s just math, and in reality all AI in its present form does is a kind of math.

Shakespeare’s genius has been reduced to the mendacity of the binary.

Is this a bad thing? Ah, here lies the rub. In a world where more and more of the decisions that are being made for us have been reduced to math, the technology behind ChatGPT and the like gives ever more power to those who would profit most through the mathification of the individual. Would this work for the majority of humans a majority of the time? Of course. Common things are common, and this type of “intelligence” is designed to parse the common.

It is in the soft surroundings that we see the danger in this next, latest great “advance” in the liberation of information, precisely because this is the first iteration in this inexorable progression in which the information is not actually liberated at all. It is, in essence, captured through the process. It is a regression to the mean, albeit many precisely defined means (Dahli, Shakespeare, Affleck, et al). After all, what each prior advance in our liberation of knowledge, each leap in the ease with which a greater percentage of humans could acquire that knowledge has done is make the next truly human genius leap accessible to more humans.

This is NOT what the faux AI of ChatGPT is doing.

A true intellect, one that is alive, intelligent, creates something new. Truly new. Something that has heretofore not existed. Cell theory. Quantum physics. Gravity. Relativity. Heck, Baye’s Theorem. Nothing that we know about AI as it now stands leads us to believe that it will solve the essential problems that lie in the pursuit of energy from fusion rather than fission. The work being done to decode the unbuilding blocks of aging is being done between the ears of living humans, not AI. The best, and worst, that we can say about the “AI” implied by the likes of ChatGPT and Bing is that it has the possibility of relieving humans from the menial, the mundane, and most damningly, the meaningful.

What will we become if we cannot, or do not interact with one another when it is meaningful? See “Ex Machina” for a particularly apt example.

In the end, or at least this beginning of the end, AI as we presently experience it is nothing more than the wrote recital of an admittedly more complex rendition of the present knowledge base of humankind. In a sense it curates the massive volume of knowledge sitting behind a query and presents it us in a manner that makes it digestible. The written word allowed us to preserve the thoughts of men such as Aristotle. The printing press made it possible for any human to read to have access to Socrates, et al. A combination of the world-wide web and the marvel that is the search engine essentially removed the need to memorize Socrates’ words, while at the same time expanded access to him, and all of his ilk, to a nearly every demographic on the planet. ChatGPT and others of its ilk can tap into the vast amount of information from, and about Socrates, curate and cull it, and then present us with a cohesive, one-bite whole.

But is that intelligence? iI is a singularly human trait to be able to conjure the truly original. As fascinating, and admittedly entertaining as it is, the AI we see demonstrated by ChatGPT, Bing, and the like is not intelligence if we define intelligence as having the capacity to create something truly original. Might it be convenient? For sure. Why not? Is it, as it is now, an unabashed and total positive? Of course not. The internet/WWW/browser universe has diminished our human intellect insofar as we as a species tend not to commit too very much to our “wetware” memory any longer. I can’t help but think that will somehow come back to haunt us, in much the same way that allowing the juvenile, barely above trivial abilities of ChatGPT and the like to take over our mundane tasks. What if we conflate the mundane (fixing a plane reservation) with something as meaningful as falling in love (vs. the mathematics of having all of our desires and expectations anticipated and fulfilled a la Ex Machina)?

In the end this is no more than another evolutionary step, and in my opinion a rather small one from a technical standpoint. It is real, for sure, and it is meaningful. But printing press meaningful? Internet meaningful? Not yet, I don’t think. Not at the level of the individual, the almost sacred level of the enlightened world. We risk demeaning our very humanity if we delegate too very much to an “intellect” which is still nothing but 0’s and 1’s. It’s nothing more than math, after all. We have used math in ever more ways over the millennia to improve the life of humans while holding tight to the non-math that defines what it is to be, you know, human.

Like feeling empathy for a patient. Or falling in love.

What passes as AI at the moment is nothing more than a tool, albeit one that will need tight leash of unbreakable rules (see Asimov: The Three Rules of Robotics). In the end intelligence, real intelligence, intelligence that moves us ahead as a species in a meaningful was as did the written word, the printing press, and the access to both afforded by the internet, comes from a place not yet visited by the artifice of ChatGPT and the like. We will need to guard against allowing such an immature intellect to provide much of anything at all in our lives, in my opinion, other than the curation of content. After all, we know not who it was to whom Shakespeare wrote his most loving sonnets, but we know that he did, indeed, love whoever it was. A new, truly real intellect will need to do more than simply create a sonnet a la Affleck as Shakespeare, professing love for Jennifer Lopez. Humans are capable of love. Whatever comes next must not only be able to speak lovingly of JLo.

To be real, to be intelligent, whatever comes next must truly be able to love Jennifer Lopez.

It’ll be me, in person, and I’ll see you next week…

“When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum.” –Leigh Alexander

Nature abhors a vacuum. In all ways and in all places. While I have never seen this immutable law applied to group culture that only speaks to my own lack of imagination and insight, and by extension Alexander’s surfeit of both. I use “spaces” a bit differently, preferring the term as a reference to internal or personal geography (timespace, brainspace, emotionalspace). Alexander’s choice of “space” rather than “place” adds to the brilliance, the “aha”-ness of the insight in that it specifically includes the virtual as well as the physical.

Some people exert, or could exert, enormous influence over very large spaces by either actively tending to the culture or by standing aside and simply observing what fills the vacuum. The CEO of our local medical behemoth has imposed his will at a very granular level on an organization that employs 10’s of thousands. Rules and regulations abound there. On the other hand, the original incarnation of CrossFit, the culture arose primarily from the founder’s deeply held libertarian philosophy and worldview. Pretty freewheeling, rough and tumble, back then.

Think for a moment about your own spaces, maybe looking initially at the ones over which you might have a bit of control or influence. Work. Home. CrossFit Box or other fitness space, whether owner or member. What has your role been in the creation and ongoing curation of the culture of those spaces? It’s a rather Taoist proposition, I think: to act is precisely equal to not acting, because one or the other course must be chosen. At my day job we actually did go about the task of creating a culture (A Tribe of Adults), and we knowingly curate that space by culling the tribe of those who don’t, won’t, or can’t acculturate. In many ways the CrossFit of today suffers from the opposite; absent the curation of the founder one it is impossible to identify much of a culture at all.

In the end this is probably just another entreaty to consciously examine your own spaces, your world, and seek to exert whatever control you can, wherever you can, in order to live well. Whatever “well” means to you. Again, the Tao te Ching gives us some useful vocabulary, imagery we might reference. In the end we are all more like the pebble in the stream than the reed in the field. We may aspire to live as the reed, flexible and ever able to flow with whatever breeze may blow through. The reality is that an untended culture surrounding us flows so powerfully that it, like the water in a stream, eventually reshapes us as it inevitably sculpts the stone in the stream.

The difference, as both Lao-tse and Leigh Alexander teach us, is that by actively choosing and then curating a culture in your space you have effectively taken control of the stream’s flow.

Last week Beth and I received an updated financial projection from our financial advisors. Did I already tell you this? I can’t remember. Should I be worried about that? The not remembering part? I don’t know. Seems like maybe not remembering is a thing. I’m just not sure if I’m remembering less than what I’m supposed to be remembering.

Anyway…

While I type Beth is pitching in the purging process of yet another family abode. This one, the apartment my Mom moved into after leaving my “ancestral” home, is the tiniest purge yet. Beth, along with my sisters and sister-in-law, have stripped the apartment bare, having already moved whatever essentials Mom was able to cram into her little suite at the Independent Living facility, Atria. The girls have done a marvelous job. All that remains are four last photo albums to go through. Life toward the end becomes ever smaller with each move.

We asked our financial advisors what would happen if we assumed that our annual financial outlays increase by 50%. Now, that may seem like a silly question to ask if you are not independently wealthy with a high likelihood of passing on multi-generational wealth, but our first go-round on this wheel saw us waving our final goodbyes and leaving behind a really silly amount of money. Sadly, our question was just an opportunity for our advisors to hit us with the full blunt force of the power of compounding. Watch your spending and you wind up with more money than you know what to do with at 92. Up your outlay? Start laying down cat food at 72.

Anyway…

Each couple in my generation has one remaining parent. For Beth and me it’s my Mom. She is now 84, soon to be 85. Dad died at 84. If memory serves my in-laws were 81 or so. All sort of within range of their predicted life expectancies, give or take. Some died rather young. Both Peter and Joanne lost their Mom’s to tumors in their 50’s, for example. Everyone still alive will reach, or exceed their statistical life expectancy.

There was a very interesting and thought-provoking article in yesterday’s WSJ about the difference between life expectancy–for me, at the moment, roughly 20 more years–and longevity. The author, Josh Zumbrun (pretty cool last name their, Josh!), cautions that one should be mindful, at the very least, of the possibility of living much longer than your life expectancy. Using myself as an example (and choosing the low ends of the estimates), my chances of living to be 90 are about 40%. Hitting 100? Almost 15%. As expected, Zumbrun goes on to point out the very real risk of outliving your savings, with the very real parallel risk that Social Security alone won’t be sufficient to cover your expenses the rest of the way. After all, he’s writing in the WSJ.

That’s not really what I think about when I look into my future and contemplate the possibility of a very long life. Oh, I do get the ramifications, specifically as to how they relate to being bludgeoned by the (lack of) compounding of our savings if Beth and I ramp up our spending any time soon after we retire. (Yes Dollie, I know that this means fewer “Tuesday Wines”. I’m paying attention). That part is just math, and to a degree I get to choose the integers (how long I work; how much we spend and when), at least for now. No, that’s not the lesson I’ve drawn from watching the survivors.

I don’t want to be alone.

When I sat down a couple of hours ago and started writing that line was originally “I don’t want to be left behind.” A riff off the more direct “I don’t want to die last”. But after scribbling that down in my notes I looked again at the survivors. The ones who have managed to survive their sorrow and maintain contact with peers, those with whom they share history or those with whom they have only recently connected, seem to be content. At the very least. While not forgetting those they’ve lost, they carry on. They are not alone. This can mean different things to different people, of course. A new significant other for some; family members of the same, or younger generations for others. It’s the not being alone that seems to matter, at least from what I’ve observed.

Do you ever reach a point where you’ve truly had enough? Fulfilled all of your goals? Done everything on all of your lists? I really wish I’d had the foresight to ask my Mom and Dad something along those lines while they were fully in control of their memories. I wonder if I would have thought to ask my Gramp if he’d lived beyond my teen years. Gamma was very clear in the last 5 or even 10 years of her life: she’d done all she needed to do and was content, ready, for many of those years. Was it the loss of her one great love, my Gramp? I wish I’d asked, but to be honest it just made me sad because it forced me to think about a world without her.

It always seemed to me that a part of Gamma was always alone, even when she was with those of us who were still there to love her. I think that she felt that she’d been left behind.

Just as I was unable to contemplate their loss when I had my parents in full, my grandparents in full, so, too, am I incapable of truly exploring what life will look like when/if I am 90. Or more. What was I saying before? Oh yeah, I remember, the savings part. All things being equal I’d like the chance to see how long we can stretch it. It would be really cool to see the intersection of longevity and compound interest. I’ll be fine with each purge, each time life gets smaller.

Unless I’m alone. I’ve seen alone. I don’t want to do it alone.

I’ll see you next week…

1 Coddiwomple. To travel in a purposeful manner toward a vague destination. No idea if it’s really a word or not. An apt description for how Beth and I spent our afternoons this past week, exploring the coast north of Palm Beach.

2 Coaching. In my no longer very brief but still very interesting life I have been privileged to coach, be coached, and watch coaches coaching others. Yesterday I saw a master class in what I would describe as “positive, affirmative coaching” as I watched the famous equestrian coach Scott Hassler give a lesson to a fellow pro. It was electric. He caught his “student” every time she did something right. Now, this student is an extraordinary rider; Scott was complimenting and cheering roughly 20 times for each modest “correction” he offered.

Honestly, it was 90 minutes of validation for all of my years as a coach.

Long, long ago I had the best job a football coach could ever have. I was the assistant to the assistant backfield coach. My job was to catch the boys doing something right. Football coaches are not noted for their talent at performing that particular task. Doing so informed literally every coaching or teaching gig I’ve had in the 20+ years since my boys hung up their cleats. It was the signature aspect of my years in the CrossFit Box. I do it when I’m sitting next to a younger surgeon in the OR. Every day in the office I try to do it with every staff member with whom I cross paths.

Why is this so effective? When it comes time to offer the correction, to teach something hard, or to explain why a certain something might be bad, the “coached” remember that most of what you have done is tell them how well they have been performing rather than harping on the negative. It’s more meaningful, the correction, when it’s been sandwiched between super thick slices of compliments. It was no different yesterday with Scott and Holly as he tuned up her already finely tuned style.

No matter what you do, if your life finds you in the position of “coach” in any way, the lesson learned once again from Scott Hassler is that positive, affirmative coaching is likely the best way to train your “students”.

3 Enough. Beth and I are sitting in an airport, headed back to the tundra that is Cleveland after a week in sunny southeast Florida. Beth was chasing her horse to more accommodating weather to train, and I was chasing Beth. This part of Florida, near Palm Beach and in the middle of the international horse world, is simply awash in “plenty”. There is just so, so much money. Each house is fancier. Same with the horses. It’s as if no one has reached a point where they can ease back and relax. Chasing the sun, it seems that they are still being chased by the ghosts of their younger, hard-charging selves. Even in what they think is repose that continue to seek more. You see it on the street, in stores, next to you in restaurants.

There is no rest, there is only more.

I try to live a life that others could emulate. It is not the only life worth emulation, but it is my hope that it is one that could be. I work among colleagues, many of whom are 2, 5, 10, and 20 years my junior. I see in many of them the shadow of my younger self. Driven and focused, mostly in the pursuit of “more.” It’s more than a little trite, but man, if only I knew then what I know now about “more”.

Don’t get me wrong, “more” is good. It is usually decidedly better than “less”. Having had both at various times in my life this is pretty clear. What I’ve learned, though, is the overarching value of “enough”. “Less” and “more” always come in the context of a comparison with some thing or some person, a time or place against which you and now are measured. Under the microscope, always trying to measure up, both “more” and “less” can feel kinda lousy. I wondered about that as I was in my coddiwomple through the area; did the need for “more” make them unhappy?

“Less” is obvious in the lousy feeling arena; no need to expand there. We saw some areas and some people who were clearly still shy of enough. But if you think about “more”, ever “more”, there is no end to it. It’s a hopeless chase, an endless endeavor, forever chasing “more”. It was there in the fancy restaurants and among the crowd at the fancy horse shows. The boulder can never reach the summit.

“Enough”, though, is sublime. Personal. Poetic. Mary Poppins (I think): “Enough is like a feast.” “Enough” lives within you. It might mean more to someone and less to another, but in the end it is a wonderfully liberating concept. “Enough” is a one-word Emancipation Proclamation for a life that is happy.

“The man who knows when enough is enough will always have enough”. –Lao Tse

I’ll see you next week…

What a nice weekend Beth and I have had! Some of the niceness is that we’ve been relatively free from big tasks and thus have been able to say yes to all kinds of fun things. At the moment we are free of illness in and (mostly) around our lives, another rather liberating characteristic of the weekend. With time on our hands Beth had a couple of epic rides on Hero, and I was able to get in all of the workouts prescribed by my fellow CrossFit OG and, you know, all-around Old Guy Bill Russell. We were free to tag along with Randy and Tess on their “wedding venue tour”; the energy of a bride-to-be is a force of nature.

And the pups and I got out to walk 4 days in a row!

What was really special about the weekend was our success in connecting with friends and family. Really connecting. Like handshake and hugs, right there together connecting. Now, if you’ve been reading my treacle over the years you know that the creation and cultivation of friendship is one of my favorite topics, one to which I return with some frequency. Friday night was spent in the company of 2 1/2 couples we’ve known for almost 30 years (one member was home sick, the “almost” part of my “illness-free” comment above). On Saturday we checked out a new restaurant downtown (look at us…driving into the Big City for dinner!) with our equestrian friends. No, we did not get there on horseback! Both nights were characterized by the comfort of being in the company of real friends.

Every couple or three years comes a slew of articles on friendship, specifically friendships in adults. Thus it is that I find myself returning to the topic for the first deep dive in awhile, having been once again bombarded with articles, books, and movies on the subject. My last deep dive was prompted when “Of Mice and Men” was revived on Broadway. Innumerable stories from college reminded me of my brother’s rather humorous story of having bumped into a fellow Eph with whom I was friendly in college (more on that in a bit). Much has been written on the subject, almost all of it a re-hash. But I came upon a significant update on one of the more important lines of inquiry into friendship, a new release of data from the latest directors of the Harvard study of happiness: “The Good Life” by Drs. Robert Wallinger and Marc Schultz.

My last update, oh 7 or so years ago, was equal parts obvious and depressing. The secret to a long and happy life was the creation and maintenance of a minimum of 3 close local friendships. This was especially important for men, a frustrating and daunting finding, what with my oft-told and hard-earned experiences with how difficult it is for men to create new friendships after the age of 30. The magic number is 3. 3 close friends predicts a longer life for men. Sadly in the telling 7 years ago this usually didn’t include your spouse (more in a bit below); the overwhelming percentage of spousal units drifted AWAY from the men in favor of younger women, usually daughters, as they moved through adulthood. 3 close friends and you live longer. Very few folks had more than 4 or 5, an incredibly tight range when you think about it.

It’s become a kind of psychological dogma that men and women make friends in very different ways. Women, it is said, make friends through the sharing of feelings. In person two women who are friends are said to be most often facing one another, talking. Maintaining this kind of friendship is structurally rather easy in our modern age of communication. Feelings can be shared in any number of ways that do not require the friends to actually be in the same room together. Phone, text, Facebook and Twitter are but a few of the tactical and mechanical advantages to a friendship built on an exchange of feelings, and the currency required for the ongoing investment is simply time.

Men on the other hand make friendship a much more arduous affair. Many women would opine that this could actually describe many, if not most things that men do, but that’s a topic for a different Sunday. The picture most often used to illustrate men in the company of friends has them standing shoulder to shoulder, in the act of sharing an experience but not necessarily sharing any internal reaction to that experience. It makes me chuckle to think that a video of the same scene would probably also look like a portrait, nothing moving, certainly not their lips. For men the basis of friendship is the experience and the fact that both were physically present for it. Whether sitting at a Bulls game in Row J seats 11 and 12, or working up a sweat at the Loyola Prep gym playing pick-up hoops, the friendship blooms only from the seed of the experience which is fertilized by proximity. At some point the memories of those experiences, stories re-told dozens, hundreds of times, fail to prompt growth in the friendship without the Miracle-Gro of presence. Eventually even shared “experiences by proxy”, raising similar aged children for example, fails to prevent slack from growing in those friendship ties if you aren’t physically there to tighten them.

A quick review of how I regard Friendship with a capital F: In my mind the universe is divided into a very few groups of varying sizes. Think of your life as kind of like a bulls-eye floating through a vast space. The center of that bulls-eye comprises that small group of true friends, men and women who would drop everything should you have need, and for whom you would do the same. Friends are people you miss if you haven’t had contact for a matter of days, people whose company you actively seek. These are people you go out of your way to see and never try to avoid. Man or woman, they know how you feel. Again, an aside, happy is the couple who have overlap in this innermost circle of the bulls-eye.

The next circle is filled with friendly acquaintances, people who make you smile. When you have an opportunity to be with them in person or in spirit it makes you happy. As I write this today I am also texting with a couple of buddies in Florida in the hope that our upcoming trip to their “neighborhood” will find them available to come out to play. There’s no limit on these, and a reasonably friendly character could have dozens of friendly acquaintances scattered throughout a life. This is the group from which most friends are created, and if you are fortunate someone who is no longer really in that bulls-eye drifts no further out from center than this inner ring.

Just outside the circle of friendly acquaintances is the ring containing acquaintances, people you’ve met and remember but either don’t ever really spend time with or never have the chance to explore a move toward the center. While visiting Williams for a game in which their boys were playing my brother met a someone of mine who has always been here, the humor in wistful remembrance notwithstanding. Your circles of friends and acquaintances drifts through a vast space filled with folks yet unmet, a (hopefully) few enemies orbiting in there somewhere as well.

Returning to “The Good Life” as it recounts the lessons learned thus far in what is undoubtedly the longest scientific study of happiness yet conducted, there is actually a bit of better news when it comes to the friendship stuff. Whereas the 3 friends thing is still mentioned, a greater emphasis has been found on happiness in a marriage. When trying to predict happiness, as opposed to longevity at least, those couples who expressed a high degree of happiness and satisfaction in their marriage while in their 50’s were much more likely to be happy, to be healthy and thriving in their 80’s. And in later life the emphasis on friends alone has evolved into the benefits of enjoying close interpersonal relationships with not only those friends but also spouses, children, and other family members.

The authors return to this again and again in the interviews I’ve watched and read.

As I become an elder in many of my circles it becomes more clear how important it is that we cherish these relationships. That we cradle and nourish them, careful to avoid shaking them lest they disappear. Shattered through acts of either omission or commission, it matters not. We float through the universe in our circles, people drifting in toward the center. In CrossFit we know both a definition of fitness and a way to measure it. Indeed, CrossFit’s founder opined that not only is fitness the most important part of health, but in his opinion it is a precise measurement of the same. He and I disagreed around the margins of that position, at least in part because of friendship and what it does for us. We may not be able to define friendship in quite as absolute terms as those we used for fitness in Crossfit, but I’m reasonably sure we all know what it means to be and to have a real friend.

Read or watch “Of Mice and Men” if you are unsure. I’ve neither seen nor read a more gut-wrenching or powerful depiction of friendship. I’ve often told the story of my Dad’s dismissive position toward the friendships of youth. I was so angry at him when he tried to talk me out of a rather ill-conceived trip to spend a week on the beach with some buddies from college before we began whatever our summers would bring that year. “In 10 years you won’t have the number of a single person in that beach house in your phone book.” He was mostly right, of course, although I still chat with one of the guys I drove down with (we were in each other’s weddings).

And I did rather famously share a drink with another this past spring.

It’s likely that friendship itself, unlike fitness, does not have a precise metric, a measurement of volume or degree. No “friendship across broad time and modal domains” like fitness, if you will. Though I continue to hold this truth, that you can never have enough friends, there is apparently a number that does have some significance. Three. Three friends, real friends, lead to a longer life. Side by side or face to face, the tipping point is 3. No amount of time spent or distance traveled is too much for them.

But in The Good Life we learn that a happier life comes from nurturing ALL of our close interpersonal relationships. Friends, spouses, and other family members. It turns out that the better we are at doing this in mid life, our 50’s and 60’s, the happier we are in our much later years. And just like the importance of including well-being in any definition of health, including happiness in our discussion of lifespan is a part of what becomes our “Healthspan”.

While not specifically in the book, I’d bet that the authors would say it’s never too early, or too late, to start nurturing all of those relationships.

I’ll see you next week…