Life Reflections

Driving the through the countryside, taking the back roads to the NC Zoo in Asheboro, we saw lots of "real" North Carolina:

• Churches. Lots of churches. Red brick, white steeples. The farther away from the cities, the more involved the names (e.g. "Liberty Holy Church of God of Prophecy"). They give you the sense that there might still be organizations in the world without a website.
  
• Cows, feed stores, fields – all the truly agrarian stuff, looking rougher and less pastoral than you might expect. A repeated pattern spreads across the land: pasture, fallow field, church, feed store, pasture, pasture, church, pasture, church, church, convenience store, church, pasture.
  
• Falling down buildings mixed in with brand-new buildings. Kinda scary in a way, to see something that used to be functional just falling apart in a ghostly fashion. Makes you think about doomsday scenarios, society falling apart, Mad Max sorts of things.
  
• But the sun was coming up over the trees, and the light was beautiful, and I felt quite happy and peaceful, with nothing to worry about that day except seeing the kids at the zoo. (Of course, that evening I talk with my wife about find a church to baptize our soon-to-be-born son, and lots of stresses and fears returned . . . And Tara emailed me about getting the Woodland Shop computer put together, which I had totally blocked out of my consciousness . . . But for once in my life, I actually literally forgot about that stuff and just spent time with my kids.
  

At the zoo, I felt myself melting in with the rest of the people there. I was just another parent with their kids. For so much of my life I've carried around a feeling of specialness, apartness . . . "I'm not like them", "I'm better than them." I could feel that softening, disintegrating. I am really not much different than any of these people.

And yet . . . I saw a man telling a woman, "All I ask you to do is to keep them with you and out of trouble," sounding calm and rational and like he's never, ever actually had to take care of children. The woman seizes a child, whacks him on the bottom several times, her face vicious: "Don't you walk away! Ever! We'll do this old-school!" Then, later, on the tram behind us, she tells her son: "You stop crying right now! It's because you don't listen to Uncle Tom." Ah . . . "Uncle" Tom. The boyfriend. And mom's beating on the kids because she's terrified the children will drive away her man. Evidently step-parenthood is contagious.

The kids had the most fun on the playground. It was a good one, with really squishy half-artificial mulch that had almost enough spring in it to feel like a trampoline. The play-sets were done in an elegant garden theme: knobbled squash big enough to climb on, twenty-foot-tall spider web, a praying mantis just begging to be ridden. The boys played so hard they eventually shed their coats and sweaters, charging up slides and hanging from giant vines with goofy grins on their faces. You can surround them with marvels, but they will still take the most joy in moving around and climbing.

They wore me out. For the first time, I'm the one who was tired and cranky at the end of the day, while they kept on rushing from one exhibit to the next. At the last stop, the Aviary, I succumbed and sat on a bench, telling them I needed to rest for a bit, and letting them roam on their own. I felt so old, more like Grandpa than Daddy. But I can't sit for long. "That parrot can bite. Don't try to touch him . . ."

Shameless plug for my wife's (literal) fifteen minutes of fame:

On our local NPR station, WUNC, my wife Janet performed live today with some select members of the Women's Voices Chorus on "The State of Things". The Chorus is performing a concert tomorrow at Duke Chapel of music inspired by Jewish poets. You can hear her radio debut here. Marvel at the fact that someone you know has been heard by hundreds of thousands of people.

Here are my goals for the year. I post them, not because I think people are dying to know what I'm doing, but because psychologically it makes all the difference in the world for me to make my goals public. The people who matter most in my life will read this; that's all I need to make the commitment stick.

Family

• Have a baby! A new child is going to put all kinds of strains on our lives this year. Janet, of course, will take the brunt of it; mothering that child will be her only goal for this year. But I do want to make commitments that will help her:
  
  • Paternity Leave. I will schedule (and really take!) two weeks of paternity leave from all work (both day job and writing job), to begin the moment we go into labor.
    
  • Support Janet's personal time. I'll do whatever is needed to support Janet in doing the personal pursuits that recharge her: singing in the Women's Voices Chorus, and doing yoga. Both are once-a-week commitments. Janet is a much happier person when she gets to do those things.
    
• Be present for my kids. Since I mostly work from home, I have more opportunity than most dads to participate in my kids' lives. But I don't think I take full advantage of it; my time with them is usually distracted, and brief, and irregular.
  
  • Regular morning time. The kids are up by 6:45 am; I need to be ready to leave all other work behind to be with them most days (5 out of 7) until they leave for school at 8:00 am. That means not flitting back to the computer as quickly as possible.
    
  • Regular evening time. I will end work by 5:30 pm most days (5 out of 7) so I can be with the kids until bedtime at 7:30 pm.
    
• Be present for my wife. Janet and I have a very good working, practical, loving relationship…but we tend to let our duties pre-empt having fun together.
  
  • Get out together. We will have six get-out-of-the-house, leave-the-kids-behind dates this year. (Some might consider that low, but considering our average for the last five years has been about one date per year, this would be a vast improvement.)
    

Community

• Serve on the EWS Board. I joined the Board of Directors for the Emerson Waldorf School last year. My personal goals for "school work" this year are:
  
  • Woodland Shop Task Force. I am leading a team of people to review and renew business plans for the school's retail store. It's a big job.
    
  • Perfect our Enrollment tracking. I designed and implemented a CRM system for the school last year, but still don't have a completely automated system for handling the school's enrollment process. I want to see that completed this year.
    

Writing

• Publish! After some soul-searching about my motivations for writing, I realized the most important thing for me to accomplish was to get (more) published. I've got into print before, but I'd like to make it a regular thing. I would like to see my work in four new publications that I can use as clips to further my writing career. It doesn't much matter what the publications are, so long as the market and content make it clippable -- the sort of work I'd cite as representative of my talents and interests, and the sort of work I want to continue doing. So, writing a 300-word sidebar for BeliefNet.com would qualify, but writing a marketing brochure for the industrial applications of Stay-Puft marshmallows would not.)
  
• Make money. Although getting published and read is my chief interest, I am still interested in making it a sustainable career. However, the economic times have made it especially tough for even seasoned professionals to find work, and especially since I'm still only doing this part-time, I think my initial goal for income should be quite modest. I intend to make $X in gross revenue. [I decided, in retrospect, that it would not be in my best interest for the whole world to know that number. If you know me, you can ask. It's a pitiful amount if I intended to make a career of it, but enough to show I'm more than a hobbyist. More than a laptop, but less than a car.]
  
• Blog. As usual, I'm going to keep daily blogging, at least until some other professional writing project can make a more legitimate claim on my time. I am most successful with my blogging when I do it first thing after I get up (usually about 5:15 am – 6:15 am).
  
• Daily reading. One of my perpetual frustrations in life is the pile of books that sits in my office, waiting to be read. Some have waiting in the same stack for years. Occasionally the thought occurs to me that I will be dead before I finally get to them. I read newspapers and magazines regularly, but the books have been overly neglected. For the last two months or so I started designating a book I wanted to read, and then reading at least 15 pages a day. 15 pages is easy enough to squeeze into even a busy day, but it adds up. In two or three weeks you can get through a typical book. The reading feeds the writing.
  
• Show up for work. My professional writing development has been delayed primarily because I never really, really dedicated significant time to the task. As Woody Allen put it: "80% of success is just showing up." This year I have decided to dedicate my working mornings, four hours for four days a week (Monday though Thursday, 8 am to 12 noon) to my writing job. That means I'm not working on anything else in that time, other than achieving my writing goals. I will tolerate whatever interruptions I would tolerate for any other job – occasional diversions are ok, so long as lost work time is made up within 24 hours.
  

Professional

• Limit my work hours. Not working crazy hours takes enormous discipline for me. This year I will work no more than 16 hours per week in my software consulting business (my day job), with 13 or more billable hours.
  
• Document in real time. My efficient skyrockets when I document my work as I do it. This year I will enter all my billing notes in real time, as items are completed or at noon or 5 pm, whichever comes first. I will create tickets for all items before starting work.
  

Health

• Daily exercise. For the last three months I have followed a schedule of daily exercise, alternating cardiovascular and strength training. The cardio workout is either a two-mile run, or 20 minutes on an elliptical machine. The strength training is push-ups, crunches, and stretching (~15 minutes). This year I will continue that daily regimen, except when illness or injury prevent it.
  

Finance

An important aspect of sustaining my writing life is making sure I have the money to do so…especially in these hard times.

• Catch up the books. I want to get all my financial records, especially my investments, completely recorded and reconciled in Quicken…and keep them that way on a weekly basis. (This is especially important for calculating my burn rate and keeping an eye on expenses.)
  
• Complete all postponed financial to-dos. I have a list of several important-not-urgent financial tasks that never seem to get done, even after years: rolling over various retirement accounts, setting up 529s for the kids, reconciling records for my health savings account. This is the year that list is completed.
  

You might have noticed there are a lot of "do-every-day" goals in this list. Many experts suggest that committing to doing something every day is a tough resolution to keep, and any failure will immediately break your spirit. I agree, in principle; but in practice I've found I have to structure my life to do something every day if I want to do it with any consistency at all. If I had a 5% failure rate on any of those goals, I would still count it as a successful resolution.

Once I've made an internal assessment of my goals at the highest level (What do I want? What must I do? How will I do it?) I start trying to break it down. Several years ago I stole a page from Steven Covey's First Things First and made goals for every role in my life. It's a good way to make sure no important aspect of your life gets neglected. The primary roles of my life are, in order of importance:

1. Father. Dr. Laura's formulation holds true for me: "I am my kids' dad." Most of my life's obligations emerge from that commitment.
   
2. Husband. Marriage is, as Augie Turak said, "living by committee." My relationship with my wife is my number one working relationship; I have to be sure it's effective. I need to make sure she has what she needs from me; I need to be sure she knows what I need from her.
   
3. Worker. My obligations to my employer, my co-workers, and my customers.
   
4. Writer. My obligations to my current and future audience, and myself.
   
5. Community Member. My primary community right now is the Emerson Waldorf School, though I still have ties in the extended spiritual community of the Self Knowledge Symposium.
   
6. Primate. That is, my relationship with my own body: sleep, diet, exercise, sexuality, health, and anything else that contributes to making me a happy animal.
   

You might ask, "Where is God in this list? Doesn't spirituality deserve a slot?" Ah, excellent question. I don't have an entirely satisfactory answer. I would like to be smugly pious and say, "God is my number one priority," but that wouldn't really be true. I don't have a relationship with God. God is behind a "cloud of unknowing". To the degree I understand what God wants for my life, it manifests in all the roles listed above. To the degree I don't know what God wants, I look for the answers in these roles. More than ever, I have come to believe in Augie Turak's vision of spiritual life: there is no spiritual life, apart from the life you lead. Spirituality cannot be compartmentalized away from everything else in your life. Your day-to-day life is your spiritual life. (I know that some people have specific spiritual practices, especially meditation, that are supposedly 100% spiritual, and which can in theory be compartmentalized from the rest of your life. I am not one of those people. Once I was, now I'm not. Maybe some day I will be again.)

The other thing that is slightly shocking about this list is that my explicit goals were mostly about the bottom of the list, and not the top. I have lots of specific goals about my health, my work in the community, my writing and job obligations . . . but I had given almost no thought at all to questions such as, "How will I be better father this year?" or "What do I need to do to help my wife reach her goals?" Hmmm . . .

Drum roll, please. The goals for 2009 are . . .

Wait a minute. Let's talk about methodology here for a moment. How do I go about setting my goals, and what factors do I consider?

1. What do I really want? I still find this to be an awkward and strange question to ask. I spent so many years reacting to other people's standards and expectations, it's hard for me stop and think about what I want to accomplish, what I want my life to be like. Every time I do it, I feel a giddy rush of excitement – "You mean I get to pick? Whatever I want?" – combined with a crushing anxiety – "Oh, hell. Now I'm responsible for making it happen." Still, I ask, and the answers bubble up:
   
   1. I still want a professional writing career. I may be no wiser about exactly what shape it will take, but I'm still sure this is the direction I want to run in. I know I have the talent to do it. It still feels like the highest and best use of my time and abilities. I just need to do it.
      
   2. I want to get control of my life. The interior struggle is still on the same battleground: manage my time, manage others' expectations, get a proactive grip on my life and stop running around putting out fires. I want to become a reliable person – someone that anyone (including myself) can count on to do what they say they are going to do.
      
   3. I want to enjoy my life. Strange that I have to say it, isn't it? But I spent most of my life with a basic assumption that I should defer gratification -- that I should suffer now to enjoy later. But as midlife looms, I realize: there is no later. This is it. If I'm going to have the life I want, I'd better be living it right now.
      
2. What do I have to accomplish? Of course, as much as I contemplate the things I really want, I also have to factor in the wheels already in motion. I am not without obligations. I still have to provide for a family, fulfill my roles in the workplace and my community. As I recognize those obligations, I try to reconnect with the intentions that lead me to them in the first place: why did I decide to do this? How does this give me what I want and need? If I can make that connection, then it doesn't feel so much like a burden. Every day, I have to choose your life all over again.
   
3. How is it going to get done? Painful experience has taught me the foolishness of setting goals without a clear strategy for accomplishing them. If I promise to do something without scheduling reasonable time to do it, I am setting myself up for failure. So I'm back to contemplating the infamous Schedule – the all-inclusive calendar of all my time, and making sure I carve out enough to give to each aspect of my life. I dream of a miraculous day when I will never have to apologize for how I've spent my time.
   

Today is Christmas. The traditional news cycle demands a frothy story about the best gifts, a tongue-in-check column about how to cope with your family, and a feel-good story about people spreading cheer to those less fortunate. This news cycle is as inevitable as Chipmunk music in malls.

Except this year. We have no stories of spreading cheer to those less fortunate, because for some reason everyone feels like they are the "less fortunate" this time around. The rich have seen their wealth evaporate in a financial crisis and/or scandal; businessmen are seeing profits dwindling; working class are losing their jobs and sometimes their homes. Typical fare in the news: "How to Say Goodbye to your home on Christmas". "In Hard Times, Houses of Worship Turn to Chapter 11 in Book of Bankruptcy." "Little holiday cheer" has been repeated in so many headlines and lead-ins that, were the Grinch's heart still two sizes too small, he would rejoice. "They're finding out now that no Christmas is coming!"

Where are the Whos? I am standing on the top of Mt. Crumpet, looking across the land, desperate to find someone who still remembers how this story is supposed to end. Even if we lose #$@%^ everything, we still have cause to sing in the morning. I bring you good tidings of great joy: life has a meaning which transcends our material fortunes.

Our flight to Philadelphia was delayed for three hours, so I spent a lot of time on Friday looking at people. I saw a lot of military uniforms of every kind: Marines in dress blues, Army enlisted men in light tan camos and stylish rucksacks, infantry sergeants with braids and stars. My wife comes from a military family, and given my conservative and hawkish nature, I was inclined to look upon these men and consider them heroes. But every time I did look at them, the only word that came to mind was "youth." They were all, every single one of them, so young that I almost hesitated to call them men. Not a gray hair among them, and most of them no more than teenagers. You hear the generals in war movies talk about "our boys," and I used to think that it was just a figure of speech; now I see it as literal truth.

The only thing that made them seem different from boys was their seriousness. They did not smile or laugh. Some stood erect and quiet, as if awaiting orders. Most sat hunched over, iPods in their ears, pecking away grimly on cell phones. Maybe music and games were just acceptable tranquilizers, the usual means of tuning out thoughts and dulling pain in the face of long boredom and stress.

A USO volunteer had a little table set up in the middle of one terminal, with a big banner with some good wish for the military personnel. "Until everyone comes home," it said. The young woman stopped anyone in military dress and shook their hands. The men would smile shyly, nod, and walk on. No one was effusive, but neither were they dismissive. It seemed like something was going on in those little greetings. I wish I could know what they were thinking. Perhaps it was relief: "Thank God there are still civilians who know there is a war going on." Or maybe it was rueful: "Lady, you have no idea what I have seen." I was touched, somehow, by this tiny display, so conspicuous in its simplicity. A human being was reaching out to these young boys with the experiences of men, not lauding them or praising them, but simply touching them, as if to say, "You belong here. You are still one of us." I think, perhaps, they really needed it.

Over ten years ago I read First Things First, Steven Covey's time-management follow-on to The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey had the perfect diagnosis for my condition: urgency addiction. I lived my life in a fundamentally reactive manner, always tending to the most urgent matters, regardless of their ultimate importance. I spent all my time putting out fires, using the thrill of responding to emergencies to blot out my anxiety over a lack of direction. The last ten years have been a long, slogging battle against that trend in my character.

I managed to take some ground when I created a schedule for myself, and explicitly made time for important-but-not-urgent tasks: writing, reading, exercise, sleep, financial management, family time. I created routines that defied urgency and ultimately reduced it. That much was all good.

Having made some basic changes in my own behavior (a remarkable accomplishment for someone pushing 40) I was inspired to embark on a writing career. I set the wheels in motion to gradually phase out of my software consulting job into professional writing. And that's when I realized that I had barely scratched the surface of my urgency addiction.

Getting out of my IT job required me to do something I could never, ever do before: say 'no' to my customers. I had trained myself to be a super-reactive, on-the-spot problem solver, and my customers had come to expect that as well. My greatest energy and productivity was activated when someone would come to me and say, "We need your help. Only you can do this." And that love of urgency has consistently plowed under any attempt to develop my writing career. I have been able to rededicate myself to writing every day, and reading the things I should be reading, but that's just keeping my writing on life support; it's not real progress toward real goals. A year after announcing my attention, I have accomplished many other significant life goals (move my mother-in-law, serve the school community, etc.), but when it comes to a writing career, I am no further along than when I started.

Ok. I give up. I am powerless before my urgency addiction. The only way I will develop a writing career is find ways to give it its own urgency. I need an editor, or several editors, who will call me to say, "I need 500 words on so-and-so by Friday, can you do that?" That, or a genuine business concern that requires constant production. Until I get a critical mass of people in my life demanding that I write, instead of demanding other things, this won't get off the ground.

I walked into the Barnes & Noble the other day, loaded with gift cards that were part of a fund-raiser for the school. Out of habit I walked to computer section, but I drifted right through it, feeling nothing. For now, at least, that part of me was burned out. I walked to writing section, and pulled two books on the business of writing non-fiction. "They're probably outdated," I thought, "but I've got to start somewhere."