Seeking Harmony, Still: Sunday musings…11/23/2025
1) Pood. Russian measurement for weight, usually applied to kettlebells. 16Kg or roughly 36 lbs.
No reason. Just been thinking about CrossFit a bit and it came up. Thought you should know.
2) Louche. French. Ish. Disreputable or sordid with a weird, inexplicable and altogether wrong attraction.
No reason. Like everyone else just reading about Epstein and his liege of powerful friends and the word came up in a email exchange with Lawrence Summers who was asking for advice. Thought you should know.
3) Polycene. A word to describe a world that is no longer binary but can only be described in terms of polythis and polythat. “With/and” vs. “either/or”.
Read it last week in the NYT and it stuck. I have a feeling that it will stay stuck until I sit down and really explore what the writer (whose name I have regrettably forgotten) was getting at.
4) Orphan. As in Holiday Orphan (seems like that should be capitalized, doesn’t it?). You find yourself away from home and unable to get to the primordial table for Thanksgiving kind of orphan. Or you are sitting at the primordial table and everyone who once filled the assembled seats is gone, or misplaced, or simply unable to make it kind of orphan. Perhaps you have a full table but you remember a time when you were unable to get home orphan.
And there was someone there to open a door and save you a seat.
The topic came up on one of the morning news shows. A grandmother mistyped a number while texting a grandchild and ended up inviting a young man far from home who had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving. Nice story. I think they are now on year 10 or 12 or something like that. Pretty sure it inspired her to invite Holiday Orphans she actually did know to join her family for the holiday. Grateful for that family, she extended her grace to others who for whatever reason would otherwise be having a turkey sub and potato chips alone in front of a meaningless football game.
If we are lucky this year we might be joined by an orphan or two. There’s room, and we have enough to share. I’m pretty sure my siblings and I will all share the story of the year my Mom decided to “orphan” herself and my Dad because she hadn’t received an adequate invitation from any of her kids. Any orphans at our table will laugh as they pass the turkey in one direction and the stuffing in the other.
Bet you have room to spare and enough to share.
5) Harmony. As I mentioned in my Midweek Memory, I stumbled upon a post from some years back that began both my quest to understand “having it all” and my ongoing conversation with my daughter on the concept that we have called “harmony”. The whole “work/life balance” canard. Megan’s core understanding is that WLB is a false construct: work is part of life and cannot be peeled out any more than eating or sleeping can. Life is as much a whole as an air squat, and you can no sooner isolate and balance your glutes in a squat than you can work in your life. Her critical insight is that what we refer to as balance is actually a complex, fluid interaction between and among all of the aspects of a life, including work.
Life is good when these interactions are harmonious.
My contribution in the early days of our conversation was to use this idea to address the other great and also inaccurately labeled concept of “having it all”. Here I reflected on conversations with two young friends inspired by Barbara Streisand’s song “Everything”. These two women were juggling three full-time gigs–parent, spouse, and professional career–all during the days of “lean in”. Having it all really meant at the time having EVERYTHING. After pondering this for a moment one of my young friends offered this: ALL is what you say it is, you just can’t have it all at the same time, and no one can have everything.
Megan and I put all of this into our little intellectual pepper pot and came up with a fully fleshed out way to address WLB using our idea of harmony in an actionable manner. There is a certain definite, definable and quantifiable measurement in each of us we can call “enough”. I’ve touched on the Taoist approach to this in the past. “The man who knows when enough is enough will always have enough.” Food, clothing, shelter. A tribe of family and friends. The ability to keep oneself healthy and well.
Someone, I can’t remember who, once said that all unhappiness comes from wanting. Wanting more than enough. There is some wisdom in that. For us this became “have what you need; want what you have.”
You’ve read the rest if you’ve been reading stuff here. You CAN have it all, you just have to be very clear about what ALL is for you and yours. You must acknowledge that not only can’t you, or anyone, have everything, you also can’t have it all, whatever that means to you, at the same time. Some parts of your all have to be in play at a certain time so that other parts can come to the fore at another. Using our Harmony metaphor, there’s a time for a drum solo, but most of the time that drum is just working with the bass in the background laying down the rhythm of the song.
It’s Thanksgiving week, a wonderful time to reflect on how one is doing on the Harmony front ,and to be grateful that the music still plays. Maybe that pesky brass section keeps threatening to drown out your lead singer, or perhaps the woodwinds have gone missing right when you would have expected them to jump in. No matter. You can’t have it all at the same time. All you can do is keep the music alive and seek harmony in the parts that are making music now. It does always seems easier when you are grateful for that.
Having it all for me means having this time to think and to share, and I am, indeed, grateful for anyone who has found themselves here. I’ll see you in a couple of days, on Thanksgiving…
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2025 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.