Aging Capriciously

This blog is about time and I want to think about the importance that dates and events have in our lives.  It is half way into February now but I hope not too late to consider the importance of this month.  Indeed, in some ways February could just be the most important month of the year for us.  Consider the following:  February was named after the Latin term Februltus, which means “a righting of wrongs.”  It is a month when we begin looking towards the end of winter and the beginning of spring.  We are now more relaxed since the holidays are long over, but it is usually too cold and wintry to do much outside unless you live in Florida or Arizona or some other warm place.  However, my thermometer says it is 37 degrees outside this morning in Arizona City so that is not exactly warm. With any luck though, it will be in the 60’s by mid-afternoon. 

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.— Mahatma Gandhi

Resentment is like a glass of poison that a man drinks; then he sits down and waits for his enemy to die.—Nelson Mandela when asked why he was not resentful for his imprisonment.

If you have the desire to learn more about forgiveness, go to the following site:   http://www.forgivenessfoundation.org/inspiration/quotes/ You can learn a great deal about forgiving others on this site.  The book How To Forgive When You Can’t: The Breakthrough Guide to Free Your Heart & Mind by Dr. Jim Dincalci is well worth reading.  Each person we carry a grudge against is a festering sore on our own hearts and souls.  There may be people whom it is good to avoid, but forgiveness is more about us than others and taking care of our immortal souls. 

Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you!  Thank you for following my blog each day.  I love the fact that people (although mostly unknown are reading my writing.)  I hope they are bringing some ideas, joy, peace or happiness to your daily efforts. You are all my Valentines so here are some quotes that you can carry through the day.  I am substitute teaching at the High School here in Casa Grande today and I forgot to bring valentines candy for the kids.  Do you remember when you were in grade school or high school and traded valentines or sent secret valentines to someone you liked?  Do you remember getting a valentine and you could not figure out who gave it to you?  Perhaps you were one of those people, who like myself, no one ever gave a Valentine’s Day card to?  Good thing I have been married to Karen because this is one of her favorite holidays.   Here are ten quotes for you to help love someone more today:

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
A. A. Milne
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
Willa Cather
Love is a game that two can play and both win.
Eva Gabor
Love is being stupid together.
Paul Valery
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
W. H. Auden
Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht
We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.
Lucretius
To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.
Henry Drummond
Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.
John Lennon
Come live in my heart, and pay no rent.
Samuel Lover

Give a Valentine to someone you like today.  Give some candy or give a compliment or give some praise.  Today is a day to spread love.  It is the greatest gift in the world and it is free.  Think of someone whom you have not talked to in quite a while, surprise them with a call. Say Happy Valentine’s Day, I was thinking of you!  What will it take? A little time is all. 

The wily detective Columbo (played by the late Peter Falk as many of you will remember) is called to the crime scene in the wee hours of the hourly morning.  The pathologist has already examined the body.  Columbo has barely managed to grab a donut and coffee.  His trademark overcoat drapes his body but he has not yet pulled out his cigar.  He looks like he has had a bad night’s sleep.  Wearily he asks the examiner, “What’s the time of death doc?”  “No question about it, the victim died at exactly 12 AM.”  Columbo shuffles his feet a bit and then pulls out and lights his cigar.  He appears to be somewhat disconcerted by the entire crime scene and you know he is beginning one of his famous stories wherein nothing is as it appears to be.  He returns to the examiner and says “Doc, how come you are so certain of the time of death?”  Well, there are three reasons detective.  First, the temperature of the body would indicate an approximate time of death as 3 hours ago.  Since, it is now 3AM that would make the time of death, 12 AM.  Second, the coagulation at the bottom of the victims body would indicate a stoppage of blood flow at about 3 hours ago and finally, the wrist watch on the victims hand is broken and the time the watch stopped is precisely 12 AM.   Is that enough detective?”  Well, that should be conclusive right?  You can’t argue with forensics and science much less a broken wrist watch.  However, as you might have guessed, these seemingly incontrovertible facts only make Columbo more suspicious.  I can hear him thinking, “It’s too pat.”  

The major suspect (of course the victim’s wife) is forty years younger than her spouse and stands to make 40 million dollars should her husband pass away.  These facts, plus the fact that she was known to have a boyfriend on the side, (her husband hired a private detective to trail her and he has these very incriminating photos) point to her motive.  However, the time of death presents a major problem.  She was at a wedding as the maid of honor and had multiple witnesses (400) to testify that she did not leave the wedding until after 2AM.  Her boyfriend (a world famous forensic pathologist who was quite a stud) was also at the wedding with her and was known to have driven her home.  Since she could not have been at the wedding at 12 AM and also killed her husband, it would appear that she was in the clear.  This sets up the drama.  

How can Columbo overcome the time of death and substantiate his gut feelings (which are never wrong) that it was really the wife and her boyfriend and not a random burglar?   Well, that is where the additional knowledge of forensics comes in.  If you would like to know how they “staged” this crime scene to make it look like a 12 AM hit, send me an email, but I will bet that if you watch CSI or any of the documentaries about the Body Farm, you have already figured it out. 

So what do time and forensics have to do with each other?  The answer is obvious, the more clues we have about the time of death, the easier it will be to solve the problem of whom, where and why.  Time is a key factor in the toolbox of the homicide detective.  Time is a process that marks every stage of our lives, but we are often not aware of this.  We can get a sense when we look in the mirror or see an old picture of ourselves and we realize that time has marked us.   But there is another message here as well.  Facts can be manipulated and things are not always as they seem.  We might be old in body but young at heart.  Science does not yet know how to measure the reverse aging that happens as we get wiser and more mature.  We grow younger as we are more open to life and to the changes that life brings.   A quote by the famous General Douglas MacArthur goes as follows:

The Columbo shows were always about the common underdog, somewhat bumbling detective (Columbo) who must pit his wits against the super-smart, super-sophisticated, ultra scientific Ubermenschen.  In the end, Columbo always outsmarts the smartest villains.  We all revel in their defeat since inside each of us is this sense of identify with the underdog.  We have all been tyrannized at some point by one of these super-smart people who seem to hold their superiority over us.  Colombo’s victories are victories for the 99% against the 1% and we love it.  We are the 99 percent and we do not have to be losers because we are not the 1 percent.   If you look at MacArthur’s quote, you can see that each of us has the potential to win our victories against life.  No matter how famous, rich, smart, successful or young you are, the meaning of life does not lie in doing or in having but in being.  It is by giving up our dreams and hopes that we lose the battle and not by growing old.  No amount of science or forensics can measure our success in this battle. 

Go on Netflix this week and watch an old Columbo show.  No commercials you know.  Have your ever watched Columbo or CSI?  What does the passage of time each day tell you about your life?  How do you measure the success you have day to day in living a life of your choice?  What could you do to find more ways to dream and hope and love?  Have you quit the battle or are you still in their pitching?  Try reading “Beyond the Body Farm” by Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. 

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today!  This is another one of those bits of exalted wisdom that we learned way back in our childhood.  It reflects the theme that I started yesterday on the “evils” of procrastination.  However, there are some who do not agree.  For instance, J. A. Spender says:  “Under the influence of this pestilent morality, I am forever letting tomorrow’s work slop backwards into today’s, and doing painfully and nervously today what I could do quickly and easily tomorrow.”  This quote by Spender is interesting and funny since it contradicts the advice about procrastination that dogs so many of us.  What I wrote yesterday about the perils of procrastination seemed like a good bit of wisdom to share. How many of us live by these bits of wisdom that we learn early in life and never question?  Unfortunately, life is never so simple or easy. There are usually two sides to every story and very few things in life are universally or unequivocally true.  For every bit of wisdom, there is a counterpoint.  A bit of wisdom that argues the opposite.

While there may be few absolutes, this does not mean that some old sayings and wise thoughts are not without merit.  More importantly, there is another moral here, which is that few things should simply be taken for granted.  According to Spender, there might also be a place for procrastination in our lives. If this is true, then we may be well advised to put off doing some things until tomorrow.  Perhaps, after a good night sleep, further reflection or simply having a better day, tackling the task that feels overwhelming today will be easier tomorrow.  Often I do not know where to start or what I need to do.  If I put the job off for a while, I can talk to others or do some further research. I am then able to come back to the task feeling more confident and competent.  Decision making is another area where the pros and cons of delay and reflection might well be argued by both sides.

Are you driven by doing things today that might be better handled tomorrow?  Do you always tackle the task even when you are not quite sure what you should be doing?  What sort of things do you think you would be better putting off doing until you have some help or more guidance?  What should you put off doing today, since you might just do a better job tomorrow or the day after?   How about a day for procrastination?

Today I will talk about a subject that seems all too fitting.  Since putting my website up for new business writers, I have been guilty of this “evil”  It is the “evil” of procrastination.  Procrastination is a word to be feared, yet it is a word that we are all too familiar with. The dictionary defines it as “To postpone or delay needlessly.”  It also traces its roots to the Latin wherein pro-crastinate means to “put forward.”  Thus, when we don’t want to do something today, we put it forward until tomorrow.  Sometimes that works and other times it starts creating a kind of sandbag effect in which it just seems easier to keep putting things off.  Why do we procrastinate? Why am I procrastinating? There are many reasons. Here are some that I have found:

You could probably put your own list up but I would guess that it would have some similarities to my list.  Is there a secret to overcoming procrastination or a solution? I think the answer is yes.  We are all intimidated by the world.  The people that accomplish the most are the ones who find support from others. Every year at graduation, I listen to the seniors in my school talk about how they could not have made it without the help and support of someone else, usually their family, a teacher or friends. Going to college for four years is a major undertaking. We can never be sure if we will pass or graduate or even manage to pay the college loans off.  Anyone who starts school begins a very long and precarious journey.  However, as the song says “I get by with a little help from my friends.” 

When you find that you are procrastinating that can be a red flag or a signal that you need some help from a friend.  Working together we can do anything. Remember Ben Franklin’s famous quote “Either we all hang together or we all hang separately.”  Why try to do it all by yourself?  Musicians, chess players, actors and sports figures all have coaches.  Coaches help us stay on track and provide moral and mental support. You may not be able to afford a high paying professional coach, but I will bet there is someone in your life that could help play this role.  Seek this person out and enlist them in your endeavor.  The secret to overcoming procrastination is to find others who can support and nurture your effort. Perhaps you can be that coach for someone else as well.

What are you putting forward today that you really need to do now?  Who can you enlist to support you mentally, physically or emotionally in your effort?  Do you need ideas or simply willpower?  Who do you know that would best provide them?  Who could you provide them for? By the end of the day, will you be able to contact them?  If not, is there someone else who could help you?  Don’t procrastinate, contact them now. You will be glad you did.

Sophie and the White Rose exemplify many of the same attitudes of groups like the Occupiers who believe that evil comes when good people do nothing.  To defy the current morality and to defy the current values of a given society is to hold a strong conviction for the possibilities of change.  When we endorse change rather than how things have always been we are in some sense defying time.  We are saying we will not wait.  We are going to take responsibility for changing the times, the hearts and minds of others.  Here in America and much of the developed world, we need to change from the mindset exemplified by quotes like:  “Shop till you drop” and “He who has the most toys wins” to a mindset that reflects admiration for values of frugality and conservation and ecology.  However, only through the kind of courage that Sophie and perhaps many Occupiers have can we change the times and bring in a new era of values.

 

What do you think about shopping till you drop?  How excited where you about the Superbowl, did it govern your entire Sunday plans?  What parts of modern society do you feel need to be changed?  Are you too glued to shopping and sports to really care about what is happening in  the rest of the world?  When was the last time you protested something you thought was wrong?  If you do not do it, who do you think will?

Imagine a young African American woman today who decided she wanted to be a pilot.  For that matter imagine anyone today who decides they want to be a pilot.  Not the easiest career to get.  Lots of training, skills and money would be major ingredients.  I can just hear my father saying “Get a job with the post office.  It pays well and is secure work.”  All I could think of was “Yeah, sorting mail 8 hours a day with the same shape envelope and the only difference being the box they go in.”  How many of you were guided to more secure and permanent jobs by your parents?  For many of us 99%, being a pilot is just one step below being an astronaut. Talk about a pie in the sky job!  Pragmatics often overrules idealism when it comes to those of us in the 99% finding meaningful employment.

Now let’s go back to 1915 in the USA. You are a 23 year old African American part Indian female manicurist.  You are living with your brothers because you have no money.  You spent all of your savings to date at the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University where you ran out of funds after one term and had to quit.  You are living in a country where every day “niggars” are lynched for being uppity.  There are many hotels, restaurants, theaters and public facilities where you are either not allowed or you must go in the back door.  Jim Crow rules and affirmative action will not be heard of for another 46 years.  Your name is Elizabeth Coleman but your friends all call you Bessie.  Most of your friends also call you a foolish dreamer and a wild eyed idealist.  Many of your friends would still call you that today if you were living in the 21^st century, but you are living in the early 20^th century.  Long before Civil Rights, Martin Luther King and woman had the right to vote, never mind take a job that was not even listed in any career book either for men or woman.  We are talking about a time when it was only 12 years after Orville and Wilbur made the first controlled flight in a heavier than air craft.  What would you give Bessie’s chance of becoming a pilot?  A million to one odds would be a bad bet.  

However, youth defies time because it is full of hope and optimism. Have you ever tried telling some young child that it can’t be done?  They do not want to hear it. It takes many years of pressure before we can convince young people that they must be more practical and give up their childish dreams.  Some of them do not listen to us “wise” folks and they foolishly go about trying to attain their wild eyed fantasies.  Elizabeth Coleman was one of these foolish people.  She did not let money, prejudice, practicality or friends dissuade her from her dreams.  No flight schools in the US would let her in because she was Black and a woman.  Even other male Black aviators would not train her because she was a woman.  So Bessie learned to speak French.  She had heard that in some faraway place called France, there were flight schools that would take an African American woman.  She somehow found financial backing from someone who believed in her dream and she went to France and attended a French flying school.  In 1921, she became the first female pilot of African American descent and the first African American to hold an international pilot license.  Bessie was only 29 years old at the time.  Ms. Coleman went on to a short but illustrious career as a stunt pilot (commercial aviation was ten years away) and media celebrity.  She was called the “World’s Greatest Woman Flyer” and was known for her hair raising stunts and daredevil maneuvers.

Ms. Coleman was ahead of her times in many other ways as well. She was never one to ignore race and did as much as she could to help create a positive image of Blacks that would overcome current racial stereotypes.  She dreamed of starting a flying school for women that would provide other women the opportunities she was denied.  Unfortunately, Bessie died in a plane accident long before many of her other dreams could be realized.  She was only 34 when a plane she was testing crashed and Ms. Coleman died. 

However, Elizabeth Coleman may have died on April 30, 1926 but her legacy not only continues on but it continues to grow in importance.  She continues to defy time.   Books, awards and other honors continue to be heaped upon her for her pioneering and breaking the boundaries of her time.  In 2004, a park was named after her in Chicago and in 2007; a street in Germany was named after her.  If Bessie was alive today, I am sure she would be coaching young men and women of all shades and colors to dream and fight for their dreams.  It is easy to lose your dreams in a world that often seems to want to keep everyone in their place and to ignore the aspirations and hopes of those who are less fortunate.  Mae Jemison, physician and former NASA astronaut, wrote in the book, Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator(1993): “I point to Bessie Coleman and say without hesitation that here is a woman, a being, who exemplifies and serves as a model to all humanity: the very definition of strength, dignity, courage, integrity, and beauty. It looks like a good day for flying.”^[6](Wikipedia) 

Do you still dream and have great hopes for the future?  If not, what dreams have you put aside as too unrealistic?  What dreams have you decided were not workable?  Why?  Are you living too practical a life?  Do you ever dream of going barefoot on a beach in the Caribbean or riding an elephant in India or going on a photo safari in Africa?  Is your excuse for not dreaming that you have no money or no time?  What do you think Bessie would say of your reasons? 

Hippies, Beatniks and Occupiers!  What do they all have in common?  Young people who are or were challenging the status quo.  Do you know any 80 year old hippies or beatniks?  You might perhaps but I bet they are a real anachronism.  It takes youth, optimism, hope and a certain naiveté to challenge the system and to actually believe you can change things.  William James said about change:  “I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.”  Hippies and Beatniks and Occupiers are all about this kind of change.  

Beatniks (1948 -1968) had their primary spokesperson in Jack Kerouac (died 1969) who in his book “On the Road” documented a sort of spiritual quest for the meaning of life.  Kerouac wrote: “It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to it… Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?”^[6]   

OK, you now may know less or more about Hippies, Beatniks and Occupiers than you really wanted to know.  In each case, I would argue they were movements mostly by youth and inspired by a vision of a better world.  In each case, I would argue a movement leavened with a certain amount of frustration and impatience.  We “older” people know you cannot change things overnight.  We “older” people know that drugs cannot effect permanent change.  In each case, movements that seem to be almost automatically rejected by mainstream society.  Is it because of the inertia that we “older” people have or is it that too many of us “older” people are members of the 1%?  Or do we simply reject the idea that the values of young people ever have anything to teach us “older” people.

I think in too many cases, we reject the values of youth because they do not match the mainstream or traditional values of society.  We reject change when it comes from those we consider too immature or inexperienced enough to teach us “older” people anything.  What do these young folks know?  We forget that they will inherit the earth and that each generation must accept and build upon the values of the previous generation as well as the values of the current generation.  Progress cannot be achieved either by mindlessly rejecting the values of the past or mindlessly rejecting the values of the present and the future.  Change is the only constant in the universe. 

 

What can we learn from the youth today?  What can we learn from the Occupy Movement?  Where have we discarded our idealism?  Are we so cynical that we have rejected the idea of change?  Do we really want to see a better world or are we happy with the status quo?  What would it take for us to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem?