Aging Capriciously

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?

A few weeks ago I wrote a series of blogs about people who “defied” time.  I noticed that all of these individuals were older.  Ages ranged from 70 to 102.   I should add that they were older in body but not in mind.  As I was writing these blogs, I was struck with the question “Could younger people defy time?”  The answer seems pretty obvious in retrospective and so I decided to write a series of 5 blogs, (I like doing things in five) about young people who have defied time.  First, let me define what I mean by defying time.  I think when a young person defies time they are doing things well before one would expect it to happen.  Perhaps they are more mature for their age or they achieve a measure of fame, fortune or success well before most people their age. 

The more I pondered this question and who I would write about, the more I thought about the nature of knowledge and wisdom.  As I have grown older, I have separated the concepts of knowledge and wisdom.  One can be very knowledgeable but not very wise.  Paradoxically, most wise people are also very knowledgeable but perhaps not about things or specific bodies of knowledge.  For example, proof that you can be knowledgeable but not wise can be had by looking at the many foolish and dangerous things that humans do to each other. Two quotes come to mind:  Martin Luther King “We have allowed our scientific knowledge to exceed our human reason. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”  Max Plank said about the Atom Bomb, “It was a triumph of intellect and a tragic failure of reason.”  If you need more proof, just look at the daily news “Politician caught in bed with prostitute.”  “Priest accused of pedophilia.”  “CEO found guilty of insider trading.”  These are very intelligent and I would argue knowledgeable people who do wrong not because of stupidity but because of lack of wisdom.  We would like to believe that wisdom comes with age or experience, but that is not true. 

Jesus Christ was 30 when he started his ministry.  Buddha became enlightened at the age of 35. Mohammed received his revelations from God at the age of 40.  David was 30 when he became king of Israel and Solomon was alleged to be under 30 when he began his reign.  You can read all the books you want, you can attend every course in the world, and you can heap degree upon degree and it will not make you wise.  Wisdom does not occur because of age or experience.  Something deeper inside or perhaps outside brings wisdom.  I wish I could give you a formula for wisdom but I cannot.  The only thing I have really learned about wisdom is that each of us must find if for ourselves.  We can follow a teacher or a master for only so long and then we must go inside and develop our own consciousness of what wisdom is.  I also believe that goodness and kindness and wisdom go together. I do not believe bad people are wise people. Wise people find ways to do good for the world.

How about we end this month with some semantics?  Right, let’s briefly talk about the study of word definitions.  Let’s explore the way that we use some common terms or phrases concerning time.  I know it sounds boring but how can we spend another year talking about time if we do not agree on some basic terms?  For instance, we talk about being on time, being ahead of the times and being behind the times. We use these phrases so often that they become “unconscious” and we seldom reflect on what they mean or whether they really mean what we want them to mean.  We all think we know what they mean but do we really agree with what they mean?  Are we using them “correctly?”   Can you really be ahead of or behind the times? 

We sometimes say that someone is “stuck” in the past.  We may know someone who seems to fondly remember their best days as when they were the high school quarterback or when they were in college or when they lived someplace else or some other time that was happier or more pleasant for them.  We joke that they are “stuck” in the past and cannot seem to move forward.  However, are they really stuck in the past?  What does it mean to be stuck in the past?  Can they be partially stuck or only stuck sometimes?  If so, how can they get “unstuck?”  Are we all stuck in the past at least sometimes? 

There are many other phrases that we use concerning time that have become so habitual with us that we take them for granted. We assume that we know what they mean when we hear them.  We apply them to our lives and to those around us without thinking about how we use them or what their use implies. The novel “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll is so powerful because the meaning of words and the way they are used in the Alice story forces us to rethink how we use words.  For instance, who ever heard of an “un-birthday” party?  Well, it is a wonderful twist on an expectation that you can only have a party on your birthday.  You can have an “unbirthday party” 364 days a year.  One of my favorite exchanges in the story takes place between Alice and Humpty Dumpty:

Which ever way you look at it, time plays a key role in the creative process. If creativity does require preparation, incubation, illumination and verification, then each of these tasks takes time.  I would also add some time for stimulation to the process. Something must be sufficient to stimulate and motivate me to want to solve a problem or be creative. If not, I will not put the time and energy into looking for a solution. Each of the phases noted above takes time. 

Many people believe that it takes a great deal of imagination to be creative. Some of us might feel wanting in this area. It is true that some people are more imaginative then others.  However, I would argue that if we apply time to our problems in a systematic fashion than we can all be creative. If you think you can solve your problems overnight, you are going to be disappointed.  If you realize that it will take time and you are willing to apply a systematic process to your problems then almost any problem is solvable. 

What problems have you been ignoring that a systematic use of time and effort might help you to solve?  How could you start working on those problems?  What changes in your life might occur if you could solve these problems? Have you labeled yourself as unimaginative and uncreative? Who could help you with these problems?  A little help with any issue can provide new insights and illumination.