Into the void

It's been way too long and I have had so many fleeting moments over the past four months where I "intended" to write, to make myself sit down and capture what I considered good thought, careful, practical insight. But the moment passed. I've recently asked myself why I let that happen.

First, I know as well as anyone after all these years of meeting so many interesting people who said time and again: "I'm going to write a book". The equivalent today is even simpler: "I'm going to post something on my blog". But we wait, postpone, excuse; we have so many other useful things to do, practical problems to solve, and ways to entertain ourselves, masquerading as taking care of our overworked and underpaid lives. "I'll write a post when I'm on vacation, when the semester ends, when the weekend comes, when I've graded this last bunch of papers, when the wedding season ends".

But the void always fills up. With something. A new TV series. Marketing for new business. Getting back to the gym on a more regular basis. Visiting with girlfriends. Catching up on reading. Organizing the closet.

I used to think my fear of failure was what kept me from blog posting until I realized that as nobody reads this, what's to worry? Then I saw that my procrastination came from fear of the void. I have nothing to say, even and especially when I have these insights and self messages to get it down into a cohesive set of sentences. But that mirror of voidness is what I face every time I sit down to write material under a deadline. Fifty four times this year I wrote wedding love stories and every single time, I started the work with what felt like an empty tank. Maybe that's a chronic condition, this void, only compounded by having no audience and no deadline. It's all a void, everything I do all day, but the hustle bustle creates an illusion more comfortable than making sense of life with words. God help me if word crafting gets in the way of my public television addiction. Well, I did it: made a date with the void and made it through.

My Executive Angel

We have this lizard brain which warns us of danger, mostly when it isn't real. But it's familiar to me, looking back over various periods of my life that were stagnant, stalled, stiff and otherwise going nowhere. Fear. Straight up deer- in- the- headlights fear is a powerful paralysis; it can become a way of life. You wake up years later and not much has changed.

Sometimes that fear can take on massive proportion. A few years ago, when my husband and I were living in upstate New York, we were selling our house. We had a failed business and nothing really compelling on the horizon, so it was time for the now old cliche: to reinvent ourselves.

After 18 years in one home and a wonderful community of good people, why not just stay put? Why not just find another house, smaller, easier to manage, and be done with it. No. I was restless for big change. Move to Boston. Just pull up stakes and move. Our two adult sons were here and why not? One reason why not was that we had no one else here, no very close friend to give us all the right tips. We certainly had no business contacts, and the only neighborhood we knew was the Copley Square area, hardly an affordable residential neighborhood.

I prayed to God for the courage to take every step, hard as it might be, to manage the move, to trust that I could pull off such a move this late in my life. After all, it was not retirement. I wanted Boston. But God was too far away, too focused on the global trajectory of my life, not to mentions billions of others lives, that I had to find an intermediary. Enter the Executive Angel. She could hear me directly and she always said: Yes you can! When I asked for help from New England strangers, she was there in my ear: "Ask the next question, or Ask the tough question". I listened to her, trusted her advice and took action until I made the move. It was a good move, the right move and just the right step at that time.

Who is the Executive Angel? She's a higher level of myself, a part of me that is capable of more than my lizard brain would ever recognize. This angel is there for everyone. If God is too busy, or interested in more global issues, the Executive Angel is easy to access. She's as ordinary as you are, except for the fact that this angel has the willpower, the humility, the relentless drive that you and I neglect to use most of the time.

The aim of a college education

As an adjunct professor for almost five years, I've heard students from 18 to 22 discuss why they came to college, what it means to be there, and most often what they plan to do when they leave.

I remember having those thoughts more than forty years ago. I would learn, achieve, impress, and then graduate to reach higher aims of status and maybe even a living wage. I would at least work in the arts where I had studied.

This didn't happen. My career in theatre never materialized (I never got remotely close to a living wage), and I earned my living not at all in the arts. Yet today I don't regret it. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are not wasted.

On Monday I plan to ask my freshmen what they consider the aim of their college education. I've asked this before informally and the answer is always the same: to get a better job, to command a better salary, to achieve status (as in respect within the community), to be proud of having fulfilled a dream and achieved a demanding commitment.

But now the question is loaded. I've thought this one through and I've come to this conclusion: the aim of education is to make meaning out of life, to have the tools to structure a life where the concrete can be made abstract and the abstract can be concretized. A college education will force you into a discipline, but that only allows you a practical tool to perhaps use for economic activity and personal fulfillment. A college education in its most classical purpose has as its end the goal of expanding personal awareness of the breadth and depth of the human condition. But this is only leading the horse to water. To drink fully of the cup of life is the goal of lifelong learning, of the school of everyday hard knocks, of failing again and again and never giving up. Getting a better job is secondary; jobs and even industries come and go. Making meaning is permanent and continuous, even when it's mostly in the subconscious (it usually is). Perhaps my freshmen will remember this forty years from now.

A social revolution

Every day about half my talk time is spent yakking with people about the free-falling economy and its effects on the job market. It's scary to think long-term over short-term and it's ambitious and perhaps naive of me to broach this in a short blog post. But here goes:

1. This is not your ordinary recession and everyone is avoiding the D word.

2. Every day the excesses of our way of life are revealed by one news release after another.

3. Pointing the finger of guilt at the guilty CEOs, the Ponzi people, etc., won't empower you and me.

4. We are actually in a social transformation, the likes of which we have never before seen.

5. Our lives have already been too busy for our souls and this is an opportunity to get the priorities straight.

6. Reach out with an open heart to all you have not had the time to give: what goes round comes round.

7. We have a brave and straight talking president who is a good role model (so far). Imitate him.

Politics Unredeemed

Last night I saw the Frontline special: Boogie Man, the Story of Lee Atwater. It was aired 11/11 and if you have On Demand you can go back and see it.

Lee Atwater was the mastermind of dirty tricks used in the re-election of Ronald Reagan in 1984, but became a Republican star by 1988 when he engineered the Willie Horton ad and other outright lies about Michael Dukakis to get the first George Bush elected. After that coup, he was named head of the Republican National Committee during the first year of 41's White House tenure. From there he began early digging into the background and the subsequent smearing in 1989 of the young governor from Arkansas who would eventually beat GHWB in 1992. But Atwater was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1990 and it killed him by 1991. He recanted on his death bed, confessing that what he did was wrong and it was also bad for the country.

What matters here is this: Atwater begat Rove and Rove begat Schmidt (McCain's mastermind the last three months of his ugly campaign). To this day they all regard Atwater as a genius at political maneuvering and bending the truth to achieve the only goal: winning. The interesting aspect watching this was seeing how those "tricks" were used in the 2008 campaign. And the best part is this: it didn't work this time.

When will they ever learn? Why were his proteges not listening to what he said during his last conscious days? Almost twenty years after Atwater's last big coup, the politics of hate and division (wedge issues) has failed. I hope and pray there are strong Republicans who will rebuild and reinvent their party based on principles , not dirty tricks.

Brave New World, Part 2

Last night I walked down to my local Bank of America ATM to deposit a check. This is one of those storefront 10 by 10 well-lit ATMs right out on a busy city street, hardly a dangerous place to transact with your money, but still anything can happen. I lived in New York city for twenty years, right through the "homeless" 80s. In those days, ATMs were dimly lit and beggars stood there and sometimes jumped you until Citibank put cops nearby.

Since the Obama victory, people are talking about a shift in how we see people of color: African Americans, Asians, Latinos, even Middle Easterners. When I inserted my card to enter the small space, already there at the two machines were six young men, all dark-skinned and no one over the age of (maybe) twenty. They spoke Spanish and they were somewhat fidgety.

My self-protective radar went up and I thought about what to do. I took the deposit envelope and when they finished I put in my check, but noticed they were standing nearby and not yet leaving, even though it seemed they had finished their own transactions. I decided to not take out any cash.

When I turned around one of them went back to the ATM with the others looking on. He had a wad of cash to deposit but was confused and awkward. finally he turned back to me and asked in Spanish how to do a "deposito". He didn't realize he needed the deposit envelope for the cash. He handed me 480 dollars and I sealed the envelope and went to the machine to watch and coach him through it. And it was a good thing. He kept hitting "cheques" instead of "ahorra". Anyway, he got it right, finally and thanked me. They, all six of them thanked me.

In five minutes of my life, fear turned to trust, to my natural ability to take care of others. This is a new day. Know hope.

Brave New World

I'm frankly baffled, out in the cold wondering what's up next. I thought of sitting down and making a list of all the things I'm not going to miss, but I couldn't imagine the shift in going from everything to nothing or at least to a very damn little. So here's the short list:

I can live without my Prius, but I do need a car for some of my out of the city assignments. A bike in winter in the Northeast doesn't do that well on the Mass Pike. I don't think they're allowed unless motorized.

I can live in a smaller home, but I do need a little privacy between my bedroom, kitchen and living room. I do need to eat and maybe having lots more time on my hands without a whole lot of work will allow me to cook long, slow meals the old fashioned way, avoiding all the waste of those pre-packaged things I buy at Costco and merely "prepare". This would be living green and saving the landfills.

Maybe we will ditch all of the two landlines we need for business and just pay for the two cell phones (or ditch the cell phones and go down to one land line). We need the line for business more than for personal use.

I could go on and on, but what about "my"Internet? How could I live without Comcast feeding my high speed? Would I become a cranky old Internet grouch?

Enough of this. I choose optimism. The alternative is just too bad for words.