Aging Capriciously

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?

Today, lets think about what it means to be a veteran. I served four years during the Vietnam war era with the US Air force. Today, I suppose I would be called a hero but then and now I never thought of myself in those terms. Many other men and women have paid for this countries freedom with their lives or their bodies and for them the term would certainly apply. However, are all veterans heroes and what about those others who risk their lives for our country but have never served; should they be called heroes? Are the people occupying Wall Street today heroes?

In “No time for heroes” an article by Bernie Reeves (May 2001), he writes: “Yet, even the most decorated veterans of the World War II era make it clear that they did not set out to become heroes, they just did their job. Heroes, it seems, are not born but created by events. And the events have to be interpreted in the right light to qualify for hero creation.” We have seen periods in history where heroes were laughed at as romantic fools and other periods where the lack of heroes was bemoaned. Since 911, it seems that we are on the upswing, with heroism being lauded practically daily in the news or TV media.

We have anti-heroes, superheroes, cowards who become heroes and people for whom heroism is a part of their daily job. At one point, a hero was anyone who risked their life to save others when they were under no obligation to do so. We did not think of a hero or heroine as someone “just” doing their job. Today though, doctors, soldiers, nurses, fire-people and police are all hailed as heroes. There was a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson called “Richard Cory” in which everyone admired and envied the dapper and suave Mr. Cory.

In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Dr. Ossian Sweet, (1905-1960) an African American man who stood up for what he believed and was a hero by any stretch of the imagination said: “I have to die a man or live a coward.” Dr. Sweet tried his hand at politics, running four times and losing each time. He married his childhood sweetheart but divorced and remarried; the second also ending in divorce. In 1960, after years of ill health and depression, he was found dead, a bullet through his head and a revolver in his hand. It is tough work being a hero.

We admire heroes and heroines and the world is a better place because of them. We each wonder in our hearts when we hear some heroic episode what we would have done. Would we have just stood there watching or would we have run into the burning house, jumped into the icy pond or charged the raging bull. I hope that our world will always have a time for heroes and heroines and not make a mockery of their bravery by downgrading it to merely living. People who become heroes and heroines may not be any different from the rest of us, but in that one second where they act and behave differently from the crowd, it forever puts them in a new league. They may never be able to live up to the expectations that attend their heroism but we should all be forever grateful to them. Heroes and heroines show us a world that could be when selfishness and greed are cast aside for love and loyalty.

Where do heroes/heroines get the time? Where do they get the courage? How many of us would risk our lives for an idea, for someone we did not know, for a principle that most people would hate us for upholding? Are we all heroes for going about our daily lives and trying to live the best we can? Or should the label be reserved for those special men and women who put their lives on the line at a time when most of the rest of the world will just stand by watching?

A “sign of the times” may be the poor attitudes of teenagers today. But wait, wasn’t that a sign of the times during the days of Socrates? Perhaps a sign of the times is the “great recession” or the increased unemployment or maybe the “war on drugs” or maybe the increased road rage. A sign of the times is an expression used to denote something that seems symbolic or emblematic of the era we are living in. “Sign of the times was a phrase strongly associated with Roman Catholicism in the era of the Second Vatican Council. It was taken to mean that the Church should listen to, and learn from, the world around it.” (Wikipedia.org)

The problem is we do not have any good reference points to compare our times to. Most of us do not have a very good knowledge of history or of what happened even a few years ago. We all tend to forget how things really were. So we think: crime is worse today, teenagers are worse today, life is harder today, etc. Then we say: “it’s a sign of the times.” However, it could easily be a sign of many times and eras gone by. What then are the dependable and predictable signs that would allow us to say with certainty that our times are different (for better or worse) than past times?

Very few things really emerge that make good signs of the times. Rising costs and rising taxes have been true forever. War, famine and pestilence were frequent during the days of the Pharaohs and are still with us today. Disease kills millions yearly and people do not really seem any less or more happy than in days gone by. Is life easier or more difficult? You would probably notice that it depended on who you asked. How then can we find a true and accurate “sign of the times?” Bottom line is you will probably not. The idea sounds good on paper but it is just too subjective. There are few signs that exist today that could irrefutably tell you what year or even decade it was, without the value of hindsight. Twenty years from now, it will be possible to look back at today and say things about it with some certainty but the present is never certain. That is why the past cannot predict the future.

We seem to dwell on the “bad signs” but maybe you can think of some good signs of the times. For instance, income levels are rising across the world and many diseases have now been eradicated that plagued humanity for centuries. What do you think are the signs of the time today? How would these compare to your signs twenty years ago? Do you think your signs would hold up if you went back two thousand years? Will these still be signs five or ten years from now? When do signs become obsolete? Do your signs tell you that things are better or worse today?

Time’s Arrow is a conception of time visualized as an arrow. “A metaphor apparently first used by Sir Arthur Eddington in 1927. This conception has not always been the commonsense view; the ancient Greeks, for example, thought that time consisted of a series of cycles, without beginning or end.” (Paul Davies, New Scientist, 11-1-1997, Issue 2106). In Christianity, time has a more linear sense than in Buddhism or Hinduism. Christians believe that if they lead a good life, they will die and go to heaven. “Hinduism believes in the rebirth and reincarnation of souls. In Hinduism, death is a temporary cessation of physical activity, a means of recycling the resources and energy and an opportunity for the jiva (that part which incarnates) to review its programs and policies (http://www.hinduwebsite.com ). Buddhists have a somewhat similar view to Hindus in that they believe only the body dies but the soul seeks out a new form and is born again.

These views of time as either cyclical or linear (an arrow) seem to be more dependent on where we were born or the religion we embrace than on any actual evidence that time goes one direction or another; or for that matter that time even exists except in our minds. The way we approach the world in Western society appears to be very different than in Eastern societies with a more cyclical view of life. Throughout our lives, we bounce between these two views of time. We live by circadian rhythms but we measure our time in a linear fashion until retirement and old age. We laugh at the inevitable cycles of fads and fashions and trends but we watch in dismay as the new generation replaces the old and throws out the culture and traditions we so cherished. We live by clocks where time goes round and round and by calendars where time is as straight as an arrow measuring each of the 365 days in a year that in one year will be replaced by the next year.

What does “time’s arrow” really mean? For most of us, it might seem to be just an abstraction that hardly affects our daily lives unless we stop for a few minutes and reflect on it. Upon reflection, we can see that it actually does have quite a bit of impact. Our economics, politics, governments and health care are built on a conception of time as either cyclical or linear. Each and every one of us is affected by our own personal view of how time progresses. The choices we make and the lives we live are determined by the way we view time. Even our attitude is based on how we perceive time. We view Mondays as very different from Fridays and Saturday and Sunday are quite different days for many of us.

Do you see time as linear and measure it as running out and running down? Or do you see time as a never ending series of cycles that continually repeat? Will you be born again or will you simply die? What if you could change how you saw time? What difference would it make in your life? Would you lead your life any differently?