Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1 Travel. Kudos to American Air. Seamless trip in and out of New York’s Laguardia Airport. Both CLE and LGA were packed. AA was super.

2 Fee. As in landing fee. As in did you know that Cleveland Hopkins airport has some of the highest landing fees in the country? Takes a ton of the mystery out of why airlines keep bailing on servicing Cleveland.

And makes the 30 minutes we spent idling on the tarmac waiting for a ground crew to park us after landing inexplicable and utterly unacceptable.

3 Friendship. My closest friend from college lives about 20 minutes (without accidents on the roads) from my brother and his family. We hadn’t seen each other in a few years so we dropped in for lunch and a tour of his new digs. Downsizing is a wholly different gig in the Northeast!

Anyway, the point here is the incalculable benefits of meeting in person. Nothing can substitute for that first hug after so long apart. Same for walking in to my brother’s house. All of our fancy ways to connect pale in comparison.

There’s no emoji that can compete with a real, live, in person hug.

4 Conflict. As I was landing a little while ago I was flashing across all of my long-distance connections when I came across something that annoyed me. Doesn’t really matter what it was, to be honest. It just rubbed me the wrong way. That is came from people who I typically like almost unconditionally added a tinge of disappointment.

So what did I do?

Well, after confirming the accuracy of the whatever, I simply moved on. Let it pass. For whatever reason, reason bubbled to the surface. Rather than push back, a rather reasonable thing under any circumstances but almost reflexive upon completing a flight, however well the airline performed (granted, “well” has a pretty low bar when it comes to airlines nowadays), I just walked on by.

Why? Not all things that bother, or all things with which you disagree, rise to the level of conflict. The teachable moment presented to me was just that: take a moment. Take a moment to first determine who owns whatever problem there is. If it’s you, like my little thing today, will you solve the problem by engaging and therefore expanding the conflict? If you engage is it possible to exit the encounter victorious? Or if not victorious, at least not seriously damaged? In the little moment that followed my tiny moment of pique it was crystal clear that creating conflict where none is presumed on whatever the other side might be would end poorly.

Sometimes you get to choose whether it’s a conflict at all.

5 It’s the end of November. In the United States we are just finishing the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the purest of our national holidays in all respects. We are entering what is euphemistically known as the “Holiday Season”, a time once used to commemorate the intersection of family and faith, now bastardized into a commercial orgasmic frenzy. It’s a bit different this year, to be sure. We’ve been shopping from home for everything from cocktails to capers for almost 2 years. I didn’t see anything remotely reminiscent of “Black Friday” in today’s papers.

Hidden in this season somewhere, alive against all odds, lie the rituals that bind us together, bind us to some version of our past. Rituals are different from habits. Habits are trainable, repeatable, common activities we engage in consistently in the hopes of some equally consistent, common outcome. They are largely personal and exist in a tiny personal domain. Rituals, on the other hand, are a shared endeavor, and choice is not always a part of the program.

Once it’s a ritual you’ve been committed.

We call these rituals by many names; in the extended White family they are traditions. We are a family that craves such things. Do it once it’s a precedent. Do it next year and it’s a tradition. Do it yet again and however it went, it is now inviolate ritual. Is this good? This year, an “off” year for our little family (kids all had their “primary” Thanksgiving feast with their in-laws), Beth and I accepted an invitation to spend the weekend with my Mom surrounded by my brother, one of my sisters, and their families. Our Thanksgiving rituals were transported largely intact some 150 miles (and 15 years) to Connecticut. As Beth and I landed and switched our phones off “Airplane mode” we already had an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner on the next “off year” 2 years hence!

Some rituals are gentle, almost whimsical. They tickle us and we smile little smiles as they come and go. Others are grand, some so outsized that “grandiose” is the only apt descriptor. There is weight to these, demands that must be met, plans that must be made. Some of this weight is real, usually born of history that stretches generations into the past. Some are even pleasant.

The power of ritual to teach and to bind is part of why they persist. The power of a ritual to resist a changing world, whether macro or micro, speaks to the inherent and personal resonance of that ritual. The more internal the effect, the greater the power.

The longer lived the ritual, the more resistant it is to a changing world. Even the tiniest bit of evolution, however appropriate, can feel like violating a kind of trust.

Church. The family meal. Travel. Gifting. All of the trappings that surround each. Why do we do what we do, especially at this time of year? Do our rituals remind us of a history that is warm, a legacy that bears propagating? Do they teach a next generation in a way that leads us to look forward with eager anticipation? Even painful rituals such as Yom Kippur end with optimism.

Do they rather simply reinforce some something that should have faded away, been allowed to die? Something that stands in the way of a better today or tomorrow, yesterday as the anchor that drags against full sails and a bright horizon? These we should have the courage to leave behind.’

Tis the season in which most of us face the longest-lived, most deeply entrenched rituals in our lives. Most of them are likely that way because they bind us to a warm past, teach us, re-fuel and inspire us. Whether writ large or small, these are what we should return to, wherever they may be, as we face the bombardment of a world a’changing.

I hope your Thanksgiving rituals left you with hearts filled to bursting, re-fueled and inspired, ready for whatever comes your way, our way, borne aloft toward a better tomorrow by the rituals of our pasts.

I’ll see you next week…

My friend Dave Granet posted a little thoughtlet on “success”, and it started a very nice conversation about what actually constitutes success and why. Thinking about success may provide us with a platform from which we might think about the other issues that may be orbiting our little personal planets. Dave’s post was this: “Successful people have a sense of gratitude. Unsuccessful people have a sense of entitlement.”

To parse this one must begin with a definition or at least an understanding of what success is, and equally importantly, what it is not. There are many terms that are often associated with success, things like wealth and power and fame. Is it necessary to have any, or all, of these to be a success? Can you be successful in the absence of any, or all, of these? Where would one fall on the gratitude/entitlement continuum if one were to have any, or all? This is really tricky, and I’m afraid that when I’m done you will likely have more questions than answers, maybe even more than you had when you started.

That may actually be the point now that I think of it. Success probably relates to what I’ve shared in the past about “All” or Everything” in that the proper definition of success emanates from within, not without, and this I think is what Dave is implying when he makes the distinction based on gratitude vs. entitlement. Let’s use an example, a very famous example, to try to illustrate this and prompt some thought: Steve Jobs.

Mr. Jobs as you know was cut down in the prime of his life by a disease that has no known cause. Was he a success? He was wealthy, famous, and wielded great power both inside and outside his company. He was married to his only spouse, and together they had healthy children (2, if memory serves). A life to be envied, no? One to which many (most?) might aspire.

A deeper dive at least suggests another story, though. It appears that Mr. Jobs, unlike his one great peer Bill Gates, had few if any close friends. Indeed, within his company and his industry he left behind a trail of despair. All one reads about is how hard it was to work with or for him. He won…for sure he won way more than he lost…but did he succeed? Was he successful? I never once read or heard anything from Mr. Jobs that implied that he was grateful for either any of his wins, or any of the spoils of his victories. There were a couple of whispers about an end of life wistfulness about a paucity of connection, though.

I don’t mean to pick on Mr. Jobs, and Heaven knows his family surely misses him. I think his example might soften the “entitlement” part of the equation a bit as I never really got a sense of that from him (as opposed to, say, your favorite rich and famous Kardashian). Being grateful, however, bespeaks connection, a very certain acknowledgement that the concrete parts of success–money, fame, power–are without any real value unless they somehow allow you to share them.

This, in turn, brings with it the humility that comes from realizing that you can’t be truly successful if success is only something you can count rather than something you can feel.

No one is entitled to victory, let alone success. In order to feel successful you must be able to admit that you neither did it alone, nor can you truly enjoy it alone. The gratitude felt by the successful is one born of thankfulness for the opportunity you must have been given, and borne aloft by the desire for your success to be one that is felt by not only you, but by others you are thankful to have in your life.

What does being successful mean to you? Rich or poor, famous or anonymous…are you successful?

Sunday musings…

Some of my drivel is evergreen, or at least as close to evergreen as whatever I may ever produce. This is from 2016 and it continues to capture how I feel about Thanksgiving. I hope you enjoy it and find a bit of meaning in it as I do each time I revisit it.

Thanksgiving is by far and away my favorite holiday. Not even close. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had much to be thankful for, always had pretty much everything I need and at least a bunch of what I (thought I) want. Seriously, I can’t really remember a single Thanksgiving in my entire life where I thought the ledger was tilted to the minus side, where I just couldn’t find so much more to be thankful about than not.

You?

Oh sure, there’s always something to gripe about. I’m not really sure what it is at the moment, but Beth called me out last night for basically being an edgy grump. Guilty, but cluelessly in retrospect, even though I managed to come up with a reasonably coherent attempt at an explanation at the time. Still, it’s almost Thanksgiving, and I’ve gotta get my…ahem…stuff sorted out.

One of the attractions for me to the day is that there are no real obligations. No gift giving. No “X shopping days until” stuff. Heck, I’d love to see a bit of Thanksgiving cheer around town, in stores and restaurants and such. Like we didn’t know all of those Christmas lights were already up the week before Halloween just because you didn’t plug them in?! Sheesh. Throw me a bone. Gimme a turkey and maybe a pilgrim hat in the window, just for a couple of days. Let me revel in the holiday where there’s really no revelry, just for a moment.

Oops…edgy grumpy again. Sorry.

Thanksgiving is so much more precisely because it’s so much less. Your family, such as it is at any given time, gets together and you eat turkey. Simple. You gather around a communal table, pass around whatever traditional fare constitutes your family’s meal, and talk all over each other with your mouth full. Everyone is more pleased to be together than not, even your cranky aunt who always–ALWAYS–tells you to swallow your food before you answer. Even she is OK on Thanksgiving.

There’s a sameness to Thanksgiving, at least in our minds, and I think that’s part of the joy, the comfort of the holiday. Close your eyes, sit back, and just for a moment think about Thanksgiving at your house. Don’t pick a particular life stage, just let it happen. What do you see? Man, it’s like seeing my life scroll out before me in countless little pictures and video snippets. My timeline is notable for one very important thing: at no point, in no image that flashes before me, am I alone.

What do you see? There’s football in mine. Lots and lots of football. The first memory in line is football. It’s so cold at the Southbridge/Webster HS game my hands feel numb typing. I had my first cup of coffee that day; they were all out of hot chocolate. You played and then came home, or went to the game and then came home. Yup, football and fires in the fireplace, and so, so much food. And there’s always that one, strange, once-a-year food, right? Peanut butter filled dried dates, rolled in pure sugar. Like a bite-sized PB&J. That’s the one I remember. It was always up to just one or two of your family members to make that weird little treat, too. I flash on my youngest sister as she rolls the dates in the sugar, feigning anger as her siblings snitch them off the plate as quickly as she rolls them. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth at the memory of those little sugar bombs.

As you sit there and move through your Thanksgiving montage you begin to notice something, though. At intervals that are not really regular, but they are there, just the same, something changes. Maybe you moved, and the dinner table is different. There are some new characters around the table, a girlfriend here, a husband there. Sometimes something is missing. You run back the tape. You look and you look, but try as you might, someone isn’t there. All kinds of reasons for this, of course, but the first time you scroll through a significant change–venue, menu, cast–it shakes you a bit, right? Your brother got married and has to share the holiday with another family. Your sister was deployed; no Skype back then to sorta, kinda, fill the space. Mom or Dad, Grandma or Grandpa, someone is no longer here to be there at all.

Here, I think, is where edgy, grumpy Darrell is probably coming from. If you’ve been around long enough, and Heaven knows I certainly have, you’ll scroll through more of these changes, these inflection points if you will. More than you really realized were happening at the time. New families. In-laws. Another generation arrives. If you could somehow go back even further, before your own little Thanksgiving memory tree started to grow, you’d find that there’s nothing really unique at all in this little part of Thanksgiving. Change, growth and change, are also part of the magic of the Holiday. What was it like for my Mom to move with her new family to a Thanksgiving in her own home? Family lore has it that my Dad’s family was more than a little unhappy with his move all of one county away. What was he thinking those first couple of Thanksgivings at my Mom’s house? For that matter, what was it like in their homes at Thanksgiving when they were the same age as their grandchildren are now?Did they have peanut butter-filled, sugar-rolled dried dates?

Every day is new. Each one is different from the last, and Thanksgiving can be no different. This week there will be much that feels like so many Thanksgivings of yore, yet it will be new as well. New babies and new lives and new places. New additions brought into our oldest traditions. Things and people to adopt and love as much as all we’ve loved before. Goodbyes to be said, however quietly.

Edgy? Well, it’s almost certainly because so very much will be new this year in our little Thanksgiving for the White family. New brings a bit of uncertainty, doesn’t it? Yes, for sure, it does. But with certainty I can say that once again, as with every Thanksgiving, I will have much more to be thankful for. The ledger will be long on thanks, needs comfortably covered, wants undoubtedly as well. I will be surrounded by those I love; when the scroll is run in the years ahead I will see my people. Of this I am quite certain.

And there will be dates. Oh my, yes, there will be dates. Sticky, gooey memories to celebrate memories of generations passing and past, and to begin the next generation’s Thanksgiving story.

Happy Thanksgiving. I’ll see you next week…

My in-laws loved to travel. Each was bitten by the travel bug early in life, and both reveled in everything there is about travel in their 50+ year marriage. I confess that the backstory to Sandy’s wanderlust is not one I know very well. Bob, on the other hand, has a story oft told about young men in his generation. Born and raised in semi-rural PA and without a family heritage that included a college degree, he joined the Navy out of high school. As a member of the Navy Band his tours during Vietnam took him through much of Europe. His time spent in the Med near a tiny town called Cap Verat was particularly influential.

Bob and Sandy were both educators, he at the college level, and Sandy as Headmistress of an alternative school called Upattinas. I’ve written about Upattinas before. Part of the curriculum there for the upper school was spending a month on the road somewhere in the U.S., usually in the West or Southwest. Bob would occasionally accompany if a daughter or two were on board. Not content with this degree of exposure to the world my in-laws coordinated a yearlong sabbatical and took to the road, 3 daughters in tow. 6 months traveling by car in the U.S. hitting some 40 states followed by 6 months living in Cap Verat in the south of France.

Beth and her sisters were well-traveled, to say the least!

Fast forward a couple of decades. Bob and Sandy have fallen in love with Mexico. It is their fervent hope that their daughters will continue to make travel a meaningful part of their lives as the girls move through and past their child-raising years. To facilitate this Bob begins to buy, and then upgrade, three timeshare properties, one for each girl. His plan was to bequeath one to each of his daughters. “I have given you a bed in Mexico to sleep in; what you do when you are not sleeping is up to you.”

Now if you have any familiarity with the timeshare industry circa 1990 you know that investing in a timeshare was not a wise financial move. The girls and their boys were not really all that aware of that in the beginning. Nope, we were just dazzled by how exotic Mexico was, and grateful for the generosity that Bob and Sandy showed to us and our families. The highlight for all of us was an epic trip for the whole fam damly (+ significant others) for a week together in Nuevo Vallarta, complete with the lifelong memory of Grampa leading the way on a jungle zip line excursion.

Eventually the reality of timeshare economics barged into Bob’s lovely gesture. Did you know that many timeshare contracts have a clause obligating the owners to pay an annual fee over which they have no say for 99 years? For sure none of us did, including Bob. Still, this gift was so special that the three daughters decided to fight for something that they could have, to make Bob’s sentiment real, without saddling his children’s children’s children with this annual burden. Beth, Lisa, and Amy consolidated their assets, gained a bit of leverage, and essentially bought out 90 years of the contract.

Leaving us with 10 years of a bed in Mexico from which we could do anything we wanted.

And so it is that Peter, Gene, and I find ourselves once again together with our girls in a spectacular property on the ocean in Mexico. Since our very first trips with Bob and Sandy when we went solo with them, we three couples have never been to this property alone. Sure, we talk a big game about how one or the other of us will head down for a long weekend, or take some part of our own families away to that “free bed in Mexico”, but none of us has pulled that trigger. This trip is about the Hurst family. Like Cape Week for the Whites, our trip to Mexico is about being Hursts.

In the end my father-in-law got his wish. Like butterflies to Capistrano, his daughters return each (non-pandemic) year to his beloved Mexico. They bring their husbands to walk hand in hand on the beaches and through the markets he and Sandy so loved at the same stage in life. It was a massive gift in all ways, the tribulations it took to liberate it from the mercenaries notwithstanding. The boy who grew up in the farm country of Pennsylvania gifted his girls Mexico. When Lisa and Gene get here we will raise our glasses to Bob and Sandy in thanks for this gift.

A gift of family.

I’ll see you next week…

At the moment I am sitting in a hotel in mid-town Manhattan, between speaker slots at a convention and wishing I’d accepted a less ambitious schedule. Typical of me when away alone, I’m trying mightily not to get on an early flight home. Still, as predictably homesick as I may be, it is good to once again be out “in the wild” among my tribe of eye peeps as we seek more and better ways to stamp out all manner of blinding disease.

While we rail against the vagaries and insults rained upon both patient and doctor by the healthcare payment “system” that exists in the U.S.

Last night I had a very illuminating conversation about some of the maddening nuances that exist in the endless games played by the government and health insurance companies as they plot to thwart the makers of pharmaceuticals and devices from being paid for the use of their products. These producers of products respond with gamesmanship of their own. This, in turn, creates vast inequities in access to both drugs and devices for patient that need them. Safe Harbors compete against Most Favored Nation clauses while middlemen called PBM’s extract a toll at every juncture of the process. Doctors (and their staffs) bend under the weight of misdirected blame and bile for treatment roadblocks they neither built nor can they demolish. Frustration rules the day.

A while ago Beth and I had a rather spirited discussion about how we in the U.S. might be able to pay for the healthcare of our citizens. Being ever practical, and also owning the job of writing the checks that pay for the “health insurance” our company offers its associates (including us), Beth in effect is arguing for a national consensus on something we might describe as a baseline ‘value’ for healthcare. Others would label her concept a ‘floor’, but you get the idea.

What Beth intuitively understands is the tension between cost, quality, and convenience. You pick a baseline or a floor and offer that to everyone. With training as a nurse and 15 years in healthcare administration, her idea of what constitutes the sum of cost, quality, and convenience naturally overweights the integers for cost and quality: outcomes should be essentially equal across the board at both the baseline or floor level, as well as any level that might be considered “luxury”. The costs of achieving that should be in some way equitably shouldered by something we could describe as “society”. Very practical. A strategy that lends itself to being observable and measurable. What’s the rub? Well, only two of the three elements that make up value are covered. To obtain an agreed upon level of medical outcomes (mortality, morbidity, longevity, etc.) the cost is covered.

Ah, but HOW you obtain those outcomes is still a variable. It is the FLOOR of value that is guaranteed. The cost of achieving that baseline universal outcome is covered, the “what you experience” in doing so is not. Our family experienced a bit of this with Beth’s Mom. She was living in a setting that provided excellent care at a reasonable cost, but in a setting that did not provide any extras; it was old, not very pretty, and had we not moved her she would have had a roommate. Her (and her daughters’) experience, what we might call “convenience” in our formula, was found to be lacking.

Therein lies the problem with any discussion about literally anything that we might discuss as a “right”. If we examine food, something we are very conscious of in the White house (Beth and I stopped eating meat 1 1/2 years ago) we find something quite similar. No one among us would say that X Million people should go without food. Indeed, we don’t even really talk about true hunger in the U.S. anymore, we talk about “food insecurity”, the concern that we may become hungry. By the same token, though, no one asserts that everyone is entitled to the same food experience. Not even a little bit. Even the most extreme in the “equality” set do not assert that EVERYONE gets swordfish if ANYONE gets swordfish; it’s the protein that matters and you can get that from a can of tuna. No, quite the contrary, all that is discussed is cost and convenience (access).

Now, of course, in my old CrossFit world (and to a degree in the medical world) it is argued that quality is an ineluctable part of nutrition, that one must extend the equation outside of food alone so that an explicit choice is made that prioritizes quality calories over other purchases. While this is accurate and proper we can reasonably define adequate nutrition as consisting of comparable protein, complex carbohydrates and beneficial fat and keep it separate from other needs, at least for the purpose of our discussion. “Quality” here would be more accurately be called the food “experience”.

How about medications? After all my conversation was with a team from a pharmaceutical company. A complete description of the morass that prescription coverage has become is way beyond the scope of this essay. Hewing closely to Beth’s proposition, each individual should have the right to obtain a medication (or device) that works. Consistent with my further interpretation of the three components of value, the floor of the care continuum is just that, the medicine that works. One should expect to shoulder the cost of more convenient forms of treatment. A 4 time per day pill versus once daily, for example.

The interplay between cost, quality, and convenience holds true in nutrition/food on a global, grand policy making level: From the value components quality, cost, and convenience, you can pick any two, but only two, when you are declaring what is the minimally acceptable level. As Beth intuits, this is similar in healthcare.

My formulaic approach to the coverage of healthcare needs has a little wrinkle that should be mentioned: quality cannot be increased ad infinitum. In all examples we might evaluate there is a practical limit to the ability to improve quality. The law of diminishing returns arrives in the form of asymptote as quality rises. For example, there is little statistical difference between 0.03% and 0.035% when we discuss the risk of a surgical intervention; it becomes similar to chance.

On the other hand, cost and convenience are unbound and can rise almost infinitely. Using an example which is more dramatic than my swordfish/canned tuna offering, alcohol in moderation is consistently shown to reduce mortality. Note that it is the alcohol in a drink that confers the health benefit; the same outcome occurs no matter what you drink. One person’s jug wine from Costco is another person’s Chateau Lafite served in the Gulfstream V.

You get the picture.

What will become of our conversations about issues such as healthcare? Will we arrive at a similar juncture to the one we have now in food, clothing, and shelter? Where quality (outcomes) and baseline cost are addressed and everyone is left to make their own call on convenience/experience (e.g. private or shared convalescent care room, filet mignon or a burger)? Beth can’t see how it can be any other way.

Me? I’m much less optimistic. That old “want vs. need” thing just keeps popping up. Confusion arises when a truly generous people confuse what people WANT with what they NEED. Need is measurable, and therefore finite, whereas want is neither. We can, and should, work to pick up the check for the true needs of each: equal outcomes at a universally affordable cost. “Want”, on the other hand, is the proverbial “free lunch”. I’m all for “a chicken in every pot” , but if you want yours to be Coq au Vin, you gotta buy your own wine.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

I’ll see you next week…

A reprise and an update on the weekend of my Dad’s passing 6 years ago.

My Dad would have been 90 this year. The “cardboard in the shoes kid” who grew up poor during the Depression and became the embodiment of the American Dream. We lost him six years ago yesterday, 10/9/2015, at 8:30 in the evening. He slipped away slowly and peacefully with my Mom and my sister Tracey present. Dad was something of a medical miracle. He survived a 4-jump bypass at age 54, lost a kidney to some weird cancer undoubtedly caused by his experience as a nuclear test “observer” in the army in the ’50’s, and lived pretty well for a couple of decades while ignoring his diabetes. His active life slowly eroded due to terrible pain caused by spinal stenosis.

His life was effectively ended when he suffered the “never event” of a spinal infection from a pain injection.

Even though he didn’t actually die for almost 3 years, we lost the Dad we knew in the ER when he was given medication which turbocharged his otherwise very mild dementia. 3 months of hospitalization later the smart, funny, kind man with back pain who entered the ER was replaced with a fearful, angst-riddled guy who couldn’t remember if he’d had breakfast 15 minutes after getting up from the table. The sole consolation in the entire endeavor was that he not only was pain free from the surgery that cured his infection, but his dementia was such that he had no memory of ever having it.

We had two and a half years to prepare, a kind of “pre-mourning” if you will. Don’t believe it. There’s no such thing. Staring at the specter of a slow, tortuous decline with all of the indignities associated with it, I was still wholly unprepared for what turned out to be an unexpected and surprisingly quick demise. Nothing of these 2+ years of knowing left me the least bit prepared.

Some time ago I attended a talk on end of life care, the first in a lecture series honoring a friend I lost to cancer a few years ago. The talk was surprisingly moving, not only because it brought back memories of Ken but also because while attending it I knew I would likely lose my Dad in the not too far future, and I thought of my folks throughout the talk. What the speaker discussed as end of life care and end of life preparations also offered a very important take-away that I tried try to apply every day since, especially with my parents.

The speaker’s thesis is that one should say 4 things often and with ease, not only in the course of completing a life’s work or concluding a life’s relationships, but in the course of living a life.

Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.

Sounds simple, huh? Maybe even a little trite. I’ve now spent several years thinking about those 4 essential things and about how they fit in a life that is not necessarily concluding (at least I hope not!). We are, each of us, part of a tiny little ecosystem; thinking about using these phrases encourages us to look outward and see the others in our own worlds whether we are approaching the conclusion of a life, or smack dab in the middle.

Actually, without really knowing it I’ve been on this path for some years now, probably guided by Beth and her inherent goodness. Friends come and go; either way I’ll likely feel a sense of completeness in any relationship if I remember these 4 things. Patients and staff do, too. I think I’m a pretty good boss and pretty user-friendly for patients as far as specialists go. Bet I’ll be better at both if I’m thinking about these, even just a little bit, even now.

Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.

I hope, sweet God do I hope that I remembered enough, said these enough. I pray that I remembered to say them to my Dad before he lost the ability to remember that I said them. Don’t wait as the end of someone’s life approaches to say these four things. Don’t wait for the conclusion of your life before you think about these.

Richard E. “Dick” White 6/21/31-10/9/15.

I really loved my Dad.

1 Anorak. Greek for geek or nerd. You thought it was just a pullover too, didn’t you…

2 Ryder Cup. I always miss my Dad the most when stuff like the Ryder Cup is being played. An event that brings back memories of a special time I got to spend with him doing something he loved. This particular one was also shared with my brother and one of my brothers-in-law when we spent a weekend together at Oak Hill in the fall of 1990.

I want to talk to him every day. Hear his voice. See his smile. All the more so on a day like Ryder Cup Sunday when we would have watched this year’s matches together and reminisced. It’s days like this that make it hard.

I miss my Dad.

3 Happiness. “We should allow others to expand and contract without taking it personally.” –Kasey Musgrave

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The three pillars upon which our country was built. It bears repeating that we are only guaranteed the right to PURSUE happiness; we are not guaranteed the happiness itself. The great conservative writer George F. Will posits that the pursuit of happiness actually IS happiness, though I doubt he’d get much uptake on that from the masses.

At the moment I am sitting in an airport with the love of my life, on the way home from visiting our daughter and son-in-law. I am quite happy. Belly filled with something called a “womelette” (an omelet poured into a waffle iron), couple of newspapers nearby, TSA successfully transited. We checked in on our new “toehold” here in the low-country, a small condo about 20 minutes from Megan and Ryan. Nothing special, just a place to call our own when the time comes that we can travel for more than a week at a time. Seeing it for the first time made us happy. Taking the 10 minute walk to the beach (and dreaming about an electric beach caddy) made us happy.

Our happiness does nothing to detract from anybody else’s pursuit of happiness.

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.

We took in an R&B performance like that last night.

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 these unhappy people. 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 otherwise would be. If that joy and happiness should come to someone who has lately had little of either, well, that’s just that much better.

Life is pretty good around Casa Blanco right now; Beth and I are returning refreshed and renewed from our too quick trip. Beneath our masks (after all, we’re in an airport) we are smiling ear-to-ear. As much as I’d like to think that means it will always be thus, that’s not how life works. We will “expand and contract”, too. 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.

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

I’ll see you next week…

This weekend has been filled with investigations of where Beth and I might land for different parts of the year once my full-time work life comes to a close. For some people this is the ultimate bucket list pursuit: where will I retire? Or if you are a Clevelander or denizen of some other locale far to the north of the Mason-Dixon line, where will I spend my time as a “snowbird”? (In case you’re wondering the leading candidate is Bluffton, near our daughter Megan.)

But I don’t really think I have a bucket list. At least not a proper, traditional bucket list filled with items I’d like to check off before I check out. Beth has an informal one (we knocked off fly fishing in July); her really big remaining item is to visit Alaska and North Dakota and thus lay claim to membership in the elusive “50 State” club. The closest I have to a bucket list is my desire to help Beth knocks this one off.

After a lifetime of planning events, packing vacation trips with as much motion as possible, trying to visit the newest, bestest restaurants and “in spots”, now 78I can barely be bothered to answer the question “how would you like your Sunday afternoon to go?” let alone come up with a bucket list.

Duke divinity professor Kate Bowler was handed the terrible news that she likely had a terminal illness. Well-meaning mental health clinicians counseled her to create a bucket list of items to pursue as a way to “find her meaning.” She comes to view this advice with something much stronger than skepticism. “A bucket list disguises a dark question as a challenge: What do you want to do before you die?” She wonders if the focus of one’s life really ought to be the collection of experiences. “[I]t is much easier to count items than to know what counts.”

Our weekend up until Beth’s well-meaning inquiry about my Sunday afternoon desires illustrates what counts for me, for us. On Friday we drove 3 1/2 hours to join our closest couple friends for dinner. Now, anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I loathe driving. But at the other end of that drive was a dinner that our friends Bill and Nancy really wanted to share with us. After a very short night it was back in the car for the drive home so that we could…wait for it…drive an hour to celebrate another couple’s 25th wedding anniversary. What counts for us has always seemed to be more about the “who” than the “what”.

Yet I can see the issue. Feel the pressure. “You must want to do something.” To which my response seems to pretty consistently be “sure there is”, as long as I’m doing it with people who mean something to me. Who count. When I look back I do actually remember what I was doing, but I always seem to remember stuff better if I was doing it with someone I cared about. I once read that we may not remember the details of our experiences terribly well, but we always remember how we felt at the time. Being with the people who count always seems to come with more intense, and ultimately more positive feelings.

A bucket list seems kinda like a scorecard, doesn’t it? Having an elaborate bucket list seems to promote a kind of scoring of the rest of one’s life. At least for me it might. Did your decisions pan out? Especially the big ones, the ones that came at a true crossroads moment. Each one of those decisions put you on the path of a singular life to the exclusion of all of the other lives that might have occurred had you chosen otherwise. Those lives may take place in a parallel part of the multiverse postulated by quantum physics and brilliantly illustrated in the Blake Crouch masterpiece “Dark Matter”, but in our one life each decision effectively ends an infinite number of other lives you might have lived. Is the encouragement to curate the remainder of life via a bucket list of big moments also a call to assess the road that brought you to the first item on your list?

Not for me. At least not by way of scoring or grading the journey, although I do enjoy recalling highlights, or those times when I, or some “we” I was part of, persevered or overcame. In this I find myself in sync with Dr. Bowler: “What strange math. There is nothing like the tally of a life…Our lives are unfinished and unfinishable. We do too much, never enough, and are done before we’ve even started.” On occasion a day may be hard, but for the most part they’ve been either good or great (HT Lance Armstrong, early post-cancer). Therein lies the single item on my bucket list: time. More time. I find myself immensely grateful for the time I’ve had. Profoundly fortunate to have been able to spend that time alongside Beth with people like Bill and Nancy. Our family. What particular moment, what specific experience, what winter’s nest is so special that it warrants a place on a bucket list?

My bucket list is nothing more than to be with the people in my life who count, making whatever time I’m fortunate to have left with them count for us all.

“What would you do if your didn’t live here anymore?”

Sunday morning breakfast on the porch are usually rather easygoing affairs. A little Facebook here, a bit of the Sunday Times there. “What are your plans today” constitutes high pressure conversation. Not so much this morning after my darling Beth dropped this little bomb into my oatmeal!

“No, really, you’re not really content. You’re antsy and I can’t figure out why. We’ve been talking about winters, about the last chapter, where and with whom we’ll be and why. What would you do differently in Florida or Bluffton or wherever?”

Doubling down as that splashed in my coffee. What, indeed, would be any different anywhere else?

To answer that requires me to look in a very critical and brutally honest way at where I am, what I’m doing now, and why it seems to both of us that I am on edge. We have no real roots where we live, at least not the kind of roots that one is tethered to when you are living in a generational location where it’s not just you and subsequent generations that are presently domiciled. With two sons and their families here the seeds for that generation have been planted, and of course the opportunity for us to cultivate that exists. We have friends and acquaintances, most of whom are also not born of this exact soil. In our ever on-the-move society those friendships are the de facto family roots for many.

Why, then, the angst? Why not satisfaction, even a sense of triumph? As a couple we chose to forge our own path away from family at near and successfully launched 3 offspring into the world with no local assistance (note: we chose this; there is no criticism whatsoever of either of our families in that statement). We survived my leap beyond the leading edge onto the bleeding edge of business models in the world of my day job, avoiding ultimate financial calamity and arriving at a place of comfort and likely security. The whole “where do you want to be” and most of “what do you want to do” is possible because of this.

We spent a couple of hours this morning pondering this. Every place we might go there is something that Beth does, something she knows and loves. there to be had. As we went round and round looking at me, my choices as well as changes that feel like they were forced on me when they arrived, we inexorably return to the same conclusion: location, for me, is irrelevant. What matters is only what I decide to do there. And not only in those hours of the day when I am solely responsible for the filling, but also as the day carries over into our shared time as a couple. After all, the happier and more fulfilled and content I am coming out of those “solo” sojourns, the happier and more content I will be as a partner.

So what is it then? Could it be regret? Has my happiness urn stealthily been aerated by regret and become a sieve? I don’t think so. Regret, at least to me, seems incompatible with any happiness at all, and to be honest I am more happy more often than not. I’ve done one really big thing really well over the years and that’s my part in our marriage, our partnership. That makes me happy every day. It’s the kind of partnership where one of us can look at the other and say “what’s wrong” and not have it sound like “what’s wrong with you.”

No, I think it’s one of the other scourges that probably would get classified under the Great Seven Sin of coveting: expectations. I think that deep down I have a case of miss met expectations that are quietly gnawing at me. Again, these are not, and I certainly do not look at them, as true hardships. Not in the classical manner of hardships. Nobody has died prematurely. Not only do we have a roof over our heads, but that roof faces an inland sea. I eat well, and I eat of my own choosing. Heaven knows I drink well. These expectations are not existential. They are personal, emotional, almost entirely self-centered, and in many instances so nebulous that even the most caring, selfless and generous soul would be completely thwarted in any effort to resolve them.

These expectations exist despite a lifelong effort to live without any expectations whatsoever. Disappointment is a metaphor for miss met expectations. The more I think about it the more it seems like my state of mind is being driven by disappointments that have been created by expectations that I have either consciously or unconsciously created for myself and others. Some are nothing more than bad luck; I trashed my right shoulder in 2008 and haven’t been pain free enough to swing a golf club until very recently. Without a private club to call my own, I very much still had the expectation that I would continue to have golf as a core activity that would not only bring me joy, but also bring me people who brought me joy. Not only that, I very much expected that a I would continue to be a very good golfer. Not playing golf separated me from an experience I had expectations of continuing. I don’t know what to think about playing post-injury, just that I know it’s not what I expected.

I’m disappointed to find myself in the position of having to work. Sounds rather arrogant when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Still, the reality is that I have made a couple of decisions about my working life and work circumstances that were epic disappointments. If they had all turned out as planned would I still be working? Probably. I really do like what I do, and it’s always satisfying if you are not only good at what you do but are continually thanked by the people you do it for. What is disappointing is that I can’t really do it just for the pleasure of doing it, you know? All of the regulatory BS and the manufactured nonsense about what’s “wrong with medicine” would be so much more palatable if it wasn’t forced down your throat because it’s a job you need. Subtle point to be sure, but looking back it seems like I had a quiet expectation beginning very early in my adult life that I would be able to walk away at this stage if I chose to do so.

What’s next then? It’s a bit scary to be honest since so many of my expectations about where I’d be, what I’d be doing, and with whom I’d be doing them haven’t come to pass. Lives evolve and the game board changes, eh? We never lived around family and now we do. What’s that gonna look like? Likewise our friendships here in town and elsewhere. Everything changes as I’ve said so many times, and yet the most honest assessment I can offer is that I’ve probably expected that they would all stay the same as they were when our kids were in grade school. Or maybe they’d be like the ones my folks had, a stable group of couples who congregated around a couple of similar interests and a bucketful of shared, or at least similar experiences. What are ours really going to look like? Beats me. Past performance means that at least some of my unspoken expectations are already way off the mark.

So my Dollie, the answer to “why?” is disappointment. Expectations I barely knew I had weren’t met and I’m disappointed. What am I going to do about that, here at Casa Blanco, in South Carolina or wherever? Well, I’m not gonna get anywhere unless I man up, face the fact that disappointment is a damaging as regret, and move on. Like Rafiki said: it doesn’t matter; it’s in the past. I can swing a golf club without pain, however poorly, and that means I can hang out around golf and golfers again. My job is enjoyable, bureaucratic BS notwithstanding, I can see the fruits of my labor, and I come home with thankful people in my wake. Not everyone can say that. We have children and grandchildren to fill our days with wonder and love. Friends with whom we do, indeed, have shared memories and experiences upon which we can build, and a lifetime of practicing our philosophy that you can never have enough friends.

I don’t think the “where” matters. Not as long as I leave behind disappointments however big or small they may seem. Like regret, now that I’ve identified the issue of expectations I can address it. Go all Timon and Hakuna Matata on it. Or channel Myamoto Musashi: “Accept everything precisely as it is.” “Where” isn’t an issue as long as “where” finds us together. I’ll figure it out and I’ll make it work wherever it is we happen to be at any time. Because nothing about us has ever been a disappointment and no matter where we’ve been everything about us has always made me happy.

I feel better already.

There are words in any language that have been co-opted in a great conspiracy. Actually, they’ve been co-opted into every conspiracy, whether great or small. I’m talking, of course, about all of the hedge words like “may” or “might” or “could”, words that can be inserted into basically any statement and simultaneously present a point of view while distancing the writer or speaker from any responsibility for either that POV or the consequences of writing/stating it. You know what I mean. Simply take a look at the Sunday papers and read a headline or two. “The election may increase blankety-blank in thus and such.” “So-and-so said blabbity blah which could result in a decrease in the weinerschitzel index.” “We think CrossFit might cause a significant change in the daily usage of pitbull greenhouse gas effluent.” It’s the same with all of the bloviation about COVID-19 and the coronavirus pandemic. Nothing but “may” and “could” and “might” in the headlines and on SoMe. Stuff like that simply litters our information pipeline.

A defining characteristic of statements like these is that the exact opposite may also occur. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the obverse is actually more likely to occur. Accuracy of this sort is precisely not what the speaker or writer is interested in, though. No, what people who write or speak like this are interested in is the projection and proliferation of a worldview that likely won’t stand up to either data or reality. Even more so, they are doing this without regard to the consequences for those who may share the sentence with the slippery and slimy hedge words. The reality is that they typically mean some sort of harm to that person, institution or idea.

They just lack the courage to not only place their flag in the sand, but to also stand next to it, defend it, and face the consequences.

Come on. Anything COULD happen. There is certainly enough uncertainty in the world that any statement with “might, could, or may” in it would turn out to be accurate. The reality is that we also live in a probabilistic world in which data can be used to give a bit more guidance. In so doing we can put the fire to the feet of those who are so careless with their regard for the effect of these words on others and too cowardly to willingly step on the fire.

How many times have we read or heard someone look at a CrossFit WOD like Deadlift 1-1-1-1-1-1-1 and say: “CrossFit may be dangerous; it might cause injury in individuals who are lifting heavy weight.” A fact-based examination of this WOD would certainly acknowledge that injury is a possibility, but the more likely outcome is that “athletes who perform a full-body functional movement like the deadlift with proper technique with relatively high intensity will gain strength.” Will. Flag firmly planted. Data available to date shows that vaccination with any of the 3 vaccines available in the U.S. will reduce the likelihood of severe illness and death by 2  orders of magnitude. Not “may” or “could” but WILL.

Flag planted.

There most definitely IS a lesson here: statements with “may”, “could”, “might” and similar hedge words are a warning that you are reading or listening to someone who is either unsure of what they are stating, or that they are very sure that they can neither prove their thesis nor defend themselves if it is shown to be false. An agenda too often lurks behind these words, and it behooves us to look for that agenda whenever we are triggered by these words.

Sadly, there is no safe space in our connected world for us to escape this kind of slime.