Aging Capriciously

Lifespan is an interesting way of looking at time. The average lifespan of a male during the Roman Empire was 28 years. During the course of the 20th century, average life expectancy in the US rose by 57 percent, from about 49 years of age in 1901 to 77 years by the year 2000. Males and females have different life spans and different countries today may vary considerably in the life spans of their citizens. Average life expectancy in Japan is 82.02 and in Angola it is 37.63 (The Worldfact book, http://www.cia.gov). All of these numbers though may be meaningless for us individually as they are simply averages. Teenagers today are involved in a high percentage of fatal car accidents and many will not live to be 21. If you smoke, drink heavily, eat poorly and never exercise, you may live to be 100 but I would not bet on it.

What are the factors that contribute to a long lifespan? These are certainly well known by actuaries who determine insurance rates based on them. Some would include: culture, heredity, health patterns, life style, job and even luck plays a factor. If you buy a life insurance policy, you are gambling that you will get more benefits out of it than you have paid in. Since insurance companies are well armed with facts and data, you are probably going to lose the bet. One of the most important contributions to increased longevity was not from any advances in medicine but was from public health education. According to the Dept of Public Health, twenty-five of the 30 years of increased life expectancy in the US during the last century can be attributed to public health initiatives rather than medical advances. Thus, we need to add hygiene to our list of factors that contribute to longevity. When we near our final hours, medical science will do all it can to stretch our last minutes on this earth. In fact, it has been stretching our life for some time now but there is definitely a cost attached to the effort.

Nevertheless, most of us would be willing to trade a few more dollars for a few more hours on earth. Some people however do think it foolish to try to extend their life beyond a reasonable point and opt to forego any last minute catastrophic life saving procedures. What is a reasonable time to live is a question that many of us will answer quite differently. What do you think is a reasonable time to live? What are the circumstances that would cause you to “throw in the towel?” Have you developed a living will to specify what procedures you will forego or are you leaving it to others to decide? This can be a difficult decision for anyone to make.

I am almost loath to use the term “BF”, but it does inspire ones thinking. The bargain hunters out there are looking for bargains. However the type of bargains being hunted is rather restricted. The only bargain that most hunters seek is what I will call “Bargainus Discountus.” This is the species of bargain wherein you “reportedly” pay less for any item than its reputed worth. Thus a Sony 42 inch HDTV that normally retails for $500 dollars is sought for the bargain price of $200. Those that are able to bag such game must have fortitude, patience and a certain amount of aggression. There are many other “hunters” out there today who are seeking the same game. But what of the other types of big game “bargains?”

• The Free Online Dictionary has the following definition for the term Bargain:
N.
1. An agreement between parties fixing obligations that each promises to carry out.
2.
a. An agreement establishing the terms of a sale or exchange of goods or
services: finally reached a bargain with the antique dealer over the lamp.
b. Property acquired or services rendered as a result of such an agreement.
3. Something offered or acquired at a price advantageous to the buyer.

V. bar•gained, bar•gain•ing, bar•gains
1. To negotiate the terms of an agreement, as to sell or exchange.
2. To engage in collective bargaining.
3. To arrive at an agreement.

As you can see from looking at this definition, there are many other possibilities that await the true bargain hunter. There is the possibility of negotiating a price with some skillful trading skills and there is the possibility of negotiating a service or trade agreement. The last has to do with time perhaps more than money. For instance, what if you could find a bargain in “Time” rather than in money? As an example, let us say you wanted to get a BA degree in Business. The average time for completing such a degree is close to four years. However, what if you could bargain with a University and get a 20 or even 50 percent discount on time so that the degree would only take 2 or 3 years to complete?

Imagine the possibilities if we could start finding and negotiating more bargains and discounts around the concept of time. If time is money and the two are (if not interchangeable) at least linked, it makes perfect sense to be able to negotiate time as well as money. Here are some examples of where it would be great to negotiate time:

• The time to get the government to do just about anything it currently does
• The time it takes to get your car repaired
• The time to schedule a doctor or dentist appointment
• The time to complete any education program
• The time to wait until I can retire
• The time it takes to get my driver’s license renewed

What can you add to my list? I would love to hear your ideas on what you think we could negotiate or bargain with in terms of time. Why should we only be able to bargain on money? As time becomes more valuable in our multi-tasking environment, perhaps we should all become hunters of “Bargainus Timus.” Now if I can only get there before the rest of the bargain hunters!

Time is money. This week in Time magazine they note that $37. 7 billion dollars is the amount U.S. workers lose each year waiting for repairs, installations and deliveries. This equates to 11 hours and 37 minutes per worker or $242 dollars for each worker (Time, 11-28-2011). That sounds like a lot of money. If only we could speed up those lazy repair people up, we could save almost ½ day each in time, not to mention billions of dollars. So let’s just suppose we could save all this time, what do you think the average American would do with it?

My best guess is the average American would probably spend more time watching TV, buying lottery tickets or waiting in line for “Black Friday” specials. Just think, this year many of the stores are going to open at 12 mid-night on Friday. At church on Sunday, our pastor said that people were already lined up and camping out at Best Buys around the country. You may argue that these exuberant shoppers are going to save money and are also stimulating the economy but somehow the idea of spending over 72 hours waiting in line for a bargain does not seem to me to be a very effective use of time or is it?

Let me assume for a second that the average American worker earns $23.19 per hour (http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.us.htm) , then waiting in line for 72 hours equals $1669.68 of potentially lost productivity and wages. Now you may say I am exaggerating here. Most people are not going to stand in line for 72 hours to get a bargain. Well, let’s assume a more modest time of say 4 hours. That equates to $92.76. If your bargains total more than $100 dollars than an economist would say that spending the four hours is a rational use of your time. However, many experts note that on the average these probably aren’t the lowest prices of the season. Retailers will see how well sales go this weekend, then mark items down between now and Christmas. You can even shop online and find better bargains and not waste any time waiting.

However, we all know that the real reason for getting up early is the fun and excitement that goes with the bargain “hunt.” We are not really being economic beings who are coldly calculating dollars and cents against time spent. Most of the calculations on the rationality of spending time really miss the point. We do not watch our time and measure it in dollars and cents. If we did, perhaps watches or cellphones would calculate wasted time for us and translate it into wasted productivity. Watches and cellphones could have a Central Dollar Time that they would beam to that would provide the latest updates in average dollar earnings and let us know exactly what each minute we were spending was costing us. As I write this blog, I fear I have just lost 1.5 hours or $34.78.

Time is more of a qualitative metric than it is a quantitative metric. Like beauty, time spent, time wasted and productive time are all in the eyes of the beholder. What is a waste of time to me is time well spent to you. What are you going to “waste” your time on today? What things are you going to do that are productive? How do you tell the difference? Do you have too much wasted time in your life? How can you better balance your productive and wasted time?

Recreation time is something we learn to value as little children. It is that time when we can “re”-create; meaning we can go out to play and have fun. Every culture in the world knows the meaning of recreation time. Doctors and scientists tell us how important it is for adults as well as children to have recreation time. It is an essential time for growth and development. We actually re-create ourselves. How do we do this? By using recreation time to pursue other interests, by being less goal oriented and by exploring things that have no immediate payoff. Recreation is doing things just for the fun of doing them without expectation of gain or reward.

As the world becomes more global and more competitive, perhaps we all need more recreation time both at work and at home. The fifteen minute break time you get at work is not the same as recreation time. That brief respite is designed to prevent you from having a nervous or physical break down. It is not nearly enough time to help you to recreate. Organizations pay lip service to the idea of growth and development but provide hardly enough time for it to happen. Colleges are one of the few institutions that give paid sabbaticals. I have often thought sabbaticals should be mandatory for all institutions both profit and non-profit. Imagine, if you could get paid to take off for a year. You could use this time to attend classes, go on vacation, pursue new hobbies or learn some new skills.

Why should a company pay for you to have time off? The simple answer is because new skills and training will benefit the company. Ideally what helps any of us become better people will help our society and our economy. This is taking a long term view of growth which is not widely recognized in organizations. Many companies refuse to reimburse for tuition and schooling unless it is directly related to the present job. This is taking the short view of life.

Well, enough writing for now. It is time for me to re-create. What are you going to do today for recreation? How much time each day do you allow for recreation? Can you say that you have fun each and every day of the week? Why not? What would it take to change your life to have more fun? When do you propose to start? How many people do you know who started a career or a business based on something that they once did for fun? Why not get paid to do what you think is fun? Maybe you can put the joy and creativity in your career that you found in your hobby. Why should work not be fun? Why can’t fun be work?

History or Her-story, which do you prefer? History is said to be told by the winners, so who tells her-story? Some might think that changing words is nothing more than semantics or perhaps political correctness. However, words have the power to shape and create. The pen has often been mightier than the sword. Words shape our reality by influencing our perceptions and our concepts of reality. What we hear and how we define meaning will prejudice what we see and what we believe. History is the story of “mankind.” But is history really the story of humankind? Who is left out of a history told (at least in school books) from a rather slanted perspective? Do we hear history from minorities, from women, from the losers?

As an example of how perspective shapes our meaning of history, in America, we have the Revolutionary War or the War for Independence. In America, the colonists were revolutionaries and freedom fighters. The British saw our war as a revolt. To them, the colonists were lawbreakers and terrorists. Another example: during the sixties, the civil rights protestors in the South were fire hosed, beaten and arrested. They were regarded by lawmakers and others as trouble makers and radicals who wanted to destroy the country. This view would hardly be shared by the protestors who wanted the right to vote, go to the bathroom and have the same schools as the white majority. Not to mention eat in the same restaurants and sleep in the same hotels.

History is ideally a recording of the events that happened in past times. Washington chopped down the cherry tree. Lincoln returned the penny. But did they really? What if we cannot ever know the “historic” truth? What if history is so full of prejudice and distortion that we can never see the underlying reality? What if there is no underlying reality? Perhaps, the only reality is the reality told by the historian. Those who write history create it. There is no answer to this dilemma since it is the dilemma of life.

We are always subjected to multiple views of reality and it is up to us to piece together the best view we can. The truth may be that there is no truth, only your truth. My truth and yours may indeed by different. Truth and history are processes that will constantly undergo transformation and change. The history you hear today may change tomorrow. The stories that are told today will change over time. The interpretations that we provide will be distorted and altered by other story tellers and other her-storians.

Do not be so sure of your reality! Do not be so sure of what you read and hear! Will you ever read this blog again? Do you think your ideas and interpretations of what you are reading now will change if you do read it again? What if you wait ten years and then read it again? How do you think your ideas will change? If you are reading it again ten years from now, what has changed in your feelings about this blog and its meanings?

Time Zones are regions of the earth that have adopted the same standard time, usually referred to as the local time. Before the adoption of time zones, people used local solar time but this became a problem as railways and telecommunications improved. As people began to travel more, it became even more of a problem because clocks differed between places by an amount corresponding to the difference in their geographical longitude. The “solution” to synchronize all clocks to the same time meant that in some areas of the world, 12 midnight would occur during broad daylight and 12 noon would occur in absolute darkness. “Time zones are thus a compromise, relaxing the complex geographic dependence while still allowing local time to approximate the mean solar time” (Wikipedia).

With the advent of high speed plane travel, time zones have become somewhat of a major nuisance to many travelers. We have all experienced the concept of Jet Lag which appears to be induced by crossing multiple time zones. This has the effect of throwing our bodies into a state of disequilibrium which can take several days to readjust. There are 24 time zones spaced at intervals of 15° in longitude. You can go forward in time and lose time or backwards in time and gain time depending on your direction of travel. If you go west, you will gain time as you cross time zones and if you travel east, you will lose time as you cross time zones. What makes this system even more confusing is the International Date Line.

The International Date Line is the imaginary line on the earth that separates two consecutive calendar days. The date in the Eastern hemisphere, to the left of the line, is always one day ahead of the date in the Western hemisphere. Without the International Date Line, travelers going westward would discover that when they returned home, one day more than they thought had passed, even though they had kept careful tally of the days. (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/international_date.html)

If you have ever traveled very much, you will find that these systems are very irritating and perplexing. It is easy to lose track of what time it is where you started from and what time it will be where you are going. You may gain a day or lose a day. I have almost arrived back before I left from some trips. For instance, if you cross seven time zones from say Paris to Minnesota and you leave Paris at 7 AM and your plane could make the trip in 6 hours, you would arrive back one hour before you left. On the other hand, the flight there would take 13 hours even though the plane could make it in six.

There are all sorts of tips, tricks, etc, to follow to minimize the impact of jet lag. Over the course of several years, I have tried quite a few of them. I am still not sure which if any really work. Going west, going east, coming home, going there have all been equally hard or easy at one time or another. The more you travel, the easier it is to adjust, but it always takes some adjustment. I was more than happy a few years ago to stop flying as much as I had. With the new changes in airport security, I would just as soon stay home unless I was going on vacation.

How have you been affected by time zones and date lines? Do they impact your life at all? Do you ever notice their effects? Do you call across time zones or travel frequently across time zones? What do you do to minimize jet lag when you travel?

Dreamin’, I’m always dreamin’.
Dreamin’ love will be mine.
Searchin’, I’m always searchin’.
Hopin’ someday I’ll find,
Someone, someone to love me.
Someone who needs me, but until then,
Well, I’ll keep on dreamin’.
Keep right on dreamin’.
Dreamin’ till my dreamin’ comes true.

“Dreamin”by Johnny Burnette (1960)

The above song was popular when I was in high school and deals with love and longing and dreaming. I can still hear the lyrics and tune today and the theme is rather haunting. “Dreaming, I’m always dreaming.” How many of us are dreamers? Have you ever been called “a hopeless dreamer?” I wonder why you hardly ever hear the term in a more positive sense. We call people hopeless dreamers but what about hopeful dreamers. Martin Luther King’s famous dream speech echoes the hopeful thought that “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Robert Kennedy said “I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” Proverbs 29:18 says that “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Where there are no dreams, people are hopeless and aimless.

I have been teaching and consulting for over 25 years now and it is my observation that wherever people have dreams and a vision, there is hope. They say hope springs eternal in the human breast, but I think life tries to beat it out of us. Life seems even more hopeless when we are engaged in “eternal wars.” We suffer from politicians who cannot agree on anything. We read daily of scholars and scientists who keep changing their minds; what was good yesterday is now bad today. I see students in school every day who are bored and see no hope. How many students are asked to dream? Most are told that if they study hard, keep their mouths shut and pay their outrageous tuition, they too may someday share the good life. Where are their dreams?

How many students and employees do you know who go to work or school every day with a dream in their hearts? Perhaps that is why we resonate with the words of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. How many of you reading this blog have a dream? Is a dream a waste of time? Would a dream help us to transform our lives? Imagine for a second if the goal of government was to help every citizen to transform their dreams into reality? I tell my students and clients that dreams become reality when we set a plan in place to transform our dreams into concrete action items with dates and priorities and sequencing. How many students and employees learn how to do that and are encouraged to do that?

Yesterday, I was substitute teaching for a group of students who had been expelled from their mainstream classes for a variety of reasons. Several of these students had parole officers. You would think given their behavior and attitudes that they would have given up on the idea of a career but that was not the case. One student had to ask five others (as part of an assignment) what they wanted to be when they left school. The answers included: police officer, firefighter, architect, computer game designer and business person. Given that the probability of these students getting into college seemed more remote than their getting into jail; I was touched by their goals and aspirations.

You could argue that they had brought their present circumstances on by their own behavior and you would be right. However, what is the behavior that resulted in their becoming pariahs in the school system? For the record, it was fighting, drugs, disobedience and unwillingness to conform to school rules. Looking beyond these surface reasons, the underlying problems with all of them were boredom and an inability to find any meaning in the traditional school curriculum. I assisted one student with an on-line algebra quiz (he got a 95%) and I could not help but think that I had the same material when I went to high school 47 years ago and have never had to use any of it since then. When was the last time you had to multiply 7 5/33 X 14 2/9? Maybe I am missing something, but I think we are forcing everyone through the same molds and expecting rabbits to fly, ducks to climb, eagles to run and monkeys to swim. We have a one size fits all school program and you either conform, drop out or are kicked out. In too many organizations, employees are hired based on “whether they will fit in or not.” We say we want innovation but then we reward and hire for conformity.

I wonder how many of us would continue to hold onto a dream if we were systematically ostracized by our friends and the community we lived in. What are your dreams? What are your dreams for your country? What are your dreams for your loved ones? How do you plan to help make these dreams a reality? What if you were measured by the breadth of your dreams? How would you stack up?

Crazy time today often has a very negative connotation. We think of the crazies in our world and the damage they often do. We try to figure out what made them crazy or what ticked off their crazy streak. We wonder “How could anyone do something so bizarre? What made them do such things?” However, being somewhat crazy and having some crazy time can have other connotations. For instance, many of us are straitlaced and very uptight. We are constantly honed to think about our duties, responsibilities and obligations to others and ourselves. There comes a time when maybe we all need to let go of these, to become somewhat “crazy.” Here are four definitions of the word crazy:

1. Mentally deranged; demented; insane.
2. Senseless; impractical; totally unsound: a crazy scheme.
3. Informal. Intensely enthusiastic; passionately excited: crazy about baseball.
4. Informal. Very enamored or infatuated (usually fol. by about): He was crazy
about her. (www.dictionary.com)

No one wants the first definition to apply to them, but the second definition has often been applied to geniuses and entrepreneurs, while the third and fourth definitions have probably applied to all of us at one time or another. Who among us is not crazy about something? Thus, craziness is simply a state of being that others do not share at that time. Craziness may also be the essence of nonconformity. Those who dance to their own drummers seldom share the same state of being that others do.

Thus, going a little crazy might be good not only for our spirit but also for our creative side. Who among us would venture out and do anything really unique or different if they afraid to flaunt convention and practical reality? In fact, craziness might just be the sine qua non of the adventurous and spirited. Crazy people can not care what others think or whether they are being “normal.” Was Steve Jobs normal or Albert Einstein or Dr. W. E. Deming? Maybe we should all be more crazy.

Have you ever been called crazy? Why? Do you ever indulge in activities that others think are crazy? What would your life be like if you were just a little more crazy? What if you danced a little crazier? Acted a little crazier? Dressed a little crazier?

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

Did Shakespeare really write this and all of the other works we give him credit for? A recent movie Anonymous plumbs this centuries old canard again. Amazing we spend more time worrying about who said this, then what the author meant. I don’t really care if Shakespeare wrote this or some miscreant wrote it who will forever remain unnamed. The profundity of the writings and the messages in these writings will echo down the halls of history for as long as humans walk the earth. They have infinitely more meaning than we can ever fathom and it matters not one wit who wrote them.

Think about the above passage. We are but fools whose time is short and we do not recognize it. We prance and clown and pose as though we were so important that whatever we do or say really matters. Our leaders (politicians, educators and ministers) act as though their ideas and positions are the most important in the world and everyone else’s position is that of a fool. Brown eyed people are superior to blue eyed people. Conservatives are superior to liberals. Catholics are superior to Jews. Americans are superior to everyone else in the world. Rich are superior to poor. Educated are superior to uneducated. Hard workers are superior to lazy workers. We learn all of these lies and more in one monstrously and hideously orchestrated effort to make our lives have real meaning.

We (you and I and everyone else) have not the slightest clue as to what real meaning is. We don’t know the difference between fact and theory or between science and art or between a truth and a lie. However, we have experts and thousands of talking heads to tell us what the difference is. Armed with the beliefs of the righteous, we sally forth upon the stage to strut our stuff. Our scenes will be over all too shortly but for a few brief moments, we can pretend that our petty lives are so important that everything else is secondary to them. This gives us the meaning that we all seek to sort out the reason and purpose of our existence on this planet.

However, there is no real meaning in ideas or in things or in egos that depend on being right or better or greater than others. Having more stuff, being wealthier or having more money has never been a passage to meaning. Any meaning we have from these positions is like the proverbial house built on sand. We see this every day in our “heroes’ who strut briefly upon the stage only to find that a short time later they are being booed off it. Meaning does not lie in things, or status or stuff or positions.

Meaning is a process. Meaning is ongoing and never ending. Like the horizon that keeps retreating as we get closer. You never obtain meaning since you must forever be reconstructing it. It changes every day and is never the same. What has meaning for you will not have meaning for me or perhaps for anyone else. Meaning is timeless and cannot be captured or bottled. Once you “capture” meaning it is no longer meaning. Then you have status and ego. The company position you so badly wanted might have created meaning in your life as you worked diligently and faithfully toward obtaining it. However, once it was obtained, you now began to define your life by it and you slowly but inexorably lose the meaning of your life.

This is how it happens with everything we want. Once we obtain it: fame, fortune, status, a custom motorcycle, once we have it, we now have lost our purpose and the meaning (for better or worse) of our life slowly erodes. Meaning is killed by stagnation and stagnation is a position while meaning is motion. Meaning is fluid and dynamic and each day brings new meaning when we are in process. Once the process becomes a product, we are no longer in meaning. Once we are defined by what we have or what we own, we have lost our meaning. Life becomes a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

What is the meaning of your life? Have you found your meaning? What can you do to find it if you have not yet found it? Have you ever thought you had found the meaning of life and then lost it? Why?

I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said “either do something worth being written about or write about something worth being done.” A group of artists is doing something I think worth being written about. Part of a series of art projects called “MONDAY MORNING,” their goal is to bring some joy and happiness to the world through a series of creative art endeavors.

In Kenya, more than 10,000 bright yellow balloons were given to commuters on their way to work on a recent Monday morning with the sole request that they hold on to the balloon until they arrive at their jobs. Kenya has seen more than its share of violence and misery over the past decade and the artist Yasmany Arboleda wanted to bring some joy to the streets of Kenya. When you look at the picture, can you just imagine how this must have transformed the streets if only for a brief time?

About a year ago, a book was published called “Thank God It’s Monday” by Roxanne Emmerich. The subtitle was “How to create a workplace you and your customers love.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if every one of us could go to work each day (particularly Mondays) with an attitude of joyous expectation? An attitude that said “I can hardly wait until I get to work because I love what I do and I know I can make a difference to the world.” What if students, workers, managers and leaders all loved their job so much that they felt this way every day of the week? Impossibly idealistic? What would it take to make it happen?

Richard Bolles wrote a popular book called “The Three Boxes of Life.” The theory is that we live in 3 boxes that create a separation problem. The boxes are work, education and play. We work but it is not much fun and we do not receive much education. We play but we do not get paid or learn much. We go to school to get educated but we do little if any meaningful work and it is not much fun. What if we could put these three boxes together? I asked this question to a bunch of hard hat miners during a training session one day and I will never forget the response I received. One grizzled old timer raised his hand and said “Well, I wouldn’t know if it were Monday or Saturday.” I was stunned by the profundity and the implications of what I had just heard.

I can find all sorts of complaints about the state of American education, about the productivity of the American labor force and about the rising income inequality in the US. Solutions seem to pour forth from politicians on a daily basis. However, I do not think any of them really hit at the core of the problem. If we want to get back on track again, we need some radical thinking. What could be more radical than thinking of putting these three boxes together for every man, woman and child in our country? Can you imagine a school where students get paid to do what is fun and meaningful? Can you imagine a workplace, where learning and play take place right alongside relevant and important work? Can you imagine when play time is synonymous with time that involves learning and pay and not just watching the boob tube?
If we could put these boxes together, we could transform the nature of education, play and work. We could create a world where no one any longer cared about clocks, weekends or time off. People would be having so much fun and still paying their bills. “Thank God it’s Friday” would become an anachronism.

Do you think it cannot be done? What if we tried? Can we create a school system where kids are not bored to death? Can we create a workplace, where people are so engaged they do not want to go home at the end of the day? Can we create playgrounds all over this country where people also go to learn and get paid? Why not? Are we perhaps stymied by a Failure of Imagination?