When Neither of the Captains Picking Their Teams Wanted You

November 6, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been another week of bad news.

I got to watch the Phillies lose to the Diamond Backs in the last two games of the National League Championship Series and it had me re-living my own years playing baseball and, more soulfully, about what it had been like being picked (often from the bottom of the barrel) for the team I’d be playing on.

But even before these misty memories, I was thinking about the men (in particular) who watch sports on TV but never played the game they’re watching despite their baseball caps and enthusiasm. They always strike me as having “no real skin in the game” while living vicariously through a bunch of thoroughbreds who don’t even spend enough hours in their home town to pay a wage tax.

The “never played part” seems hopelessly arms-length to me, while the players who make up the Phillies (or any professional sports team for that matter) fly in the face of every tribal instinct that adds up to “local” as far as I’m concerned. Most of the showboats out on the field don’t care enough about this place to actually live and raise their kids here. So watching this week re-connected me to the sensation of bat-meeting-ball and “that impossible catch” way-back-when, but also somewhat less so because those protean skills were being demonstrated by the best out-of-towners-that-money-can-buy who were pretending to be my home team.

Back when I could do a credible run around the bases, baseball to me was so local that I could almost hit the roof of my house with a homer if the wind was right.

We had two sports seasons back then—Spring and Fall—which roughly coincided with baseball and football. There were several, multiple-kid families near-by and one of them (across the street) had the right-sized backyard and the properly-motivated oldest brother to organize a game almost every afternoon in those swollen hours when exiting the school bus melted towards dinner time.

With winning in each captain’s mind, the biggest hurdle before starting a game was getting picked for your team.

It was more or less the same random sample of players each day so our pluses and minuses were pretty well known, but my memory is that the draft picks were always reduced to the kids that each captain either wanted or didn’t want (until the last rounds gave them only the bad choices) which was where I regularly fell. That meant you were literally in a meat parade every afternoon if you were brave enough to show up for the selection process, and some of the easily-wounded who also lived near-by skipped it altogether, got an early start on their homework, or sat around feeling sorry about being a klutz, a spaz or a cry-baby.

It felt Darwinian because it was.

As one commentator with similar memories—who may also have been watching the end of the same baseball season on TV— noted:

_{“you see yourself, maybe for the first time, through the cold eyes of an appraiser. You are no more than a body in the mind of this person, an object with too many deficiencies to catalog: chubby, knock-kneed, weak-armed, timid, poorly coordinated, scared of the ball, slow.”}

Because every game promised camaraderie, excitement and a fast clock towards nightfall, I always showed up (despite the pain of it) even though I hadn’t yet discovered that I might be able to do something to improve my “low-value status,” or even become “an athlete” someday.

We’ll return to this commentator (and his suspicions that the trauma of this experience can cause permanent scarring) in a minute, but somewhat like him I devised my own “work-around” to this miserable situation, having neither an older brother nor a father who was around enough to show me what I needed to do.

Because the neighborhood draft-pickers already knew my inabilities too well for me to ever game them, I practiced turning myself into something more desirable at school during recess, where a similar winnowing out process for the games we played took place nearly every day. Kick-ball, dodge-ball, whatever it was, I’d focus (in advance) on how to make some kind of indelible impression every single time I got the chance: kicking the ball harder and farther than the last dope, throwing the ball hard enough to smack some asshole who needed impressing, looking at how the “first picks” moved around the field compared to me, stumbling around and seemingly out-of-place.

I didn’t realize how much I was teaching myself about playing a sport, being on a team, becoming “the kind of man” that other men wanted on their team. Sure, I was trying out conformity instead of forging my own singular path, but it was also about getting better at something, and maybe something as worthwhile as self-mastery.

While I was re-living these early, tooth-and-claw chapters of my team-playing evolution, I remembered a New Yorker essay that’s never left me about a remarkable coach (who also happened to be a world-famous art curator) and how he turned a gaggle of 9-year old boys from Manhattan into the Metrozoid’s football team. Among many other things, he had the boys break “that mystical game” down into its component parts so that they could “get good at” each part before getting good at the whole. A few years ago, I wrote here about Kirk Varnedoe’s game mechanics and general wizardry in Who We Go-ToTo Learn How To Get There.

Similarly, I worked at each part of my baseball game and at the-putting-it altogether-part and never stopped until I slowly started inching up the pecking order– or at least high enough to know that I didn’t have to be a passive victim of a selection process that was going to repeat itself for decades and through entire careers.

Somebody else is always going to pick or reject me. So what am I going to do about it?

Some rejects spend the rest of their lives fleeing those first rejections in a kind of “safe harbor” they’ve built for themselves.

Instead of rising to positions somewhere beyond their capabilities (a phenomenon once called “The Peter Principle”) because higher-ups kept falling for these individuals’ confident self-promotion, there is also (in my observation) a category of under-achievers who only go as far as their easiest successes because the risk of being rejected when putting yourself out there is simply too painful to ever attempt again.

The aforementioned commentator (Rich Cohen writing in the Wall Street Journal), sees this kind of pain as plausibly originating at team selections in the course of childhood games and grade-school gym classes, those earliest and, for some, indelible brushes with “natural selection.” He also explains why this might be so:

_{“the feeling of randomness, being misunderstood, underestimated and judged for all the wrong reasons. We will never get rid of it because it’s a pure expression of the human condition.”}

To be judged unfairly. Or maybe (because you really do suck as a ball-player) to be judged fairly, and then to feel badly about it because in its harsh light, somebody else’s judgment has revealed something about you and how you’re viewed by others.

Of course, it’s what you do (or don’t do) next that matters. While he never says anything as matter-of-fact as “just try to get better at taking the test you just failed,” Cohen does seem to see the benefit in working through your suffering somehow.

_{“Maybe it’s better to face [a draft, selection process like this one] and learn to overcome it in the same years that you are learning about the Declaration of Independence and human reproduction [that is, while you’re young]. After all, you only learn to disregard the draft—and, better still, turn it to your advantage—once you’ve suffered it.”}

But the lack of specificity of his thinking here—for example, he never exactly says how one can turn this situation into an “advantage”—made me wonder whether Cohen really thought his way through the traumatizing quandary and out the other end, particularly when he wonders out loud:

_{“Were these [meat-market] auctions the source of all my problems, the insecurities and panics, the angers and paranoia, that still haunt me? Were they the cause of the occasional drinking-binge, meditation retreat and need to write?”}

Could all of that possibly be happening to this day if he’d truly found a way to leave his particular meat-markets stronger instead of weaker?

I can only speak to my years being assessed in these ways. It seems to me that the only way to gain some measure of damage-control over selection processes like these is to first off, be clear-eyed about your weaknesses, and then to do whatever you can to mitigate their impact in whatever game you want to be playing in. Then, even if you’re the last one picked—or not picked at all—you’ll have the empowering satisfaction of pushing yourself to the point of improvement.

Of course, this is not just a boys-to-men phenomenon. And, to the extent it is still “a man’s world of business” out there (but one with far more women in it), the girls-to-women cohort needs to deal with these selection processes too—just as endlessly and ad nauseam but also the only way you can deal with them effectively. (It’s one reason I’m a proponent of girls playing team sports: so they too can get familiar with and learn how to triumph over these gruesome dynamics.)

Which was why I was taken aback by Cohen’s citing and then providing his own rationale for a growing opposition to the playground/gym-class draft picking process. Apparently for some time now, the practice is being phased out, and at least part of Cohen seems to approve.

_{“As long ago as 1993, the New York Times headlined a story, ‘New Gym Class: No More Choosing Up Sides.’ Because it traumatizes kids, separates them, leaves a mark on their psyche.”}

(At this point I wondered: Is this what happened to those wimpy, TV sports-team fanboys who shied away from team sports themselves because they couldn’t “live with the rejections that came with it”? Are they seeking a jolt of toughness or even of “masculinity” by watching a team of mercenaries pursue what they never had the fortitude and resilience to pursue on a competitive playing field?

These will have to be questions for another day.)

All I can speak to is my experience once again, and how glad I am that no one was protecting me before I got the chance to prove what I needed to prove to myself.

Because one day, long ago, on the Burn’s family’s Spring-Season baseball field, I actually got picked first by one of the opposing captains. Some other player may have been sick or on vacation that day, providing an opening for the top spot (my memory is a tad hazy about that), but about the moment when I was picked there is nothing but clarity.

One of the captains (maybe Walter) must have remembered my recent hitting, catching and sliding into third-base before he had a chance to recall his earlier impressions of me. And because he wanted to be on the winning side when the game was done, he went for the best player that was available in the first round.

I still remember how proud I felt that day.

I had already felt the empowerment of those prior games, when I’d seen myself improving in all those ways.

Now, when somebody else was finally noticing, I got the first-hand opportunity to view them side-by-side and realized (in some ways, once-and-for-all) that getting your own shit together was the better of the two..

This post was adapted from my October 29, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Consolations of Boredom

October 9, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about some of the better escapes I’ve been enjoying in posts about “shoe gaze” music and “gourmet cheeseburger” TV, but after having these experiences and telling others about them, I always return to the same place I briefly left behind.

It’s the every-day-to-day where we spend most of our lives—because even when we’re trying to escape it’s routines and foregone conclusions, its mono-tones and tastes, we still carry its most troubling baggage with us. (Have you ever noticed how little you can truly “get away” on vacation?)

So I’ve been wondering for years now about ways to eke more sustenance out of the familiar places we want to escape from while reducing their uneasiness.

The question gained greater-than-normal urgency when we sheltered in place during the pandemic. At the time I argued for establishing everyday rituals to conjure more satisfaction, even meaning, out of a meal or how we get up in the morning (Extra From the Ordinary). I also drew some comfort from seeing how others—like comedian Bo Burnham—not only coped but almost thrived during the isolation because he knew, from being a kind of outsider as a child, “how to turn an uncomfortable situation into comedy” (Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do).

Moreover, the bankrupting aspects of everyday life don’t have to be a problem we solve on our own or just with the aid of our immediate families. By expressing our intention to face a common fate together, so-called “intentional communities” that share religious or social convictions can elevate some of the day’s opportunities and relieve some of its burdens by enabling their adherents to approach them together (The Re-Purposing of Ancient Wisdoms).

That time my example was of a kind a modern, Benedictine-Rule-based monasticism. But even then, its high level of commitment to any community made its solution wobble a bit (particularly here in America) where we keep saying we value our freedom and independence far too much to subordinate ourselves to the tyranny of any group. Like Groucho Marx, I feared too many of us would rather be alone than join any club that would be willing to have us.

So if we can’t imagine the long-term community benefits that might come with sacrificing some of our short-term personal preferences, what else might offer a consistent path to less stressful “living and working” on a regular basis? This week—yet another one I found difficult to weather “with my chin up”—I’ve been wondering out loud about the following:

Is it possible to experience a blissful relief within the boring intervals between our occasional escapes?

_{Pictured here (and up top) are different views of an “action sculpture” from 1999’s Wasser[or Water] installation Series by Swiss artist Roman Signer. As a boy, Signer dreamed of navigating white-water rivers and as an adult embarked on kayaking trips in remote mountainous areas until, one day, a companion of his failed to return with him. The kayak has been a recurring element in his work ever since. According to one commentator,“Wasserinstallation creates a vacuum where the beginning and the end of an imaginary journey converge.” You can explore more of Signer’s lifetime of visual artistry here.}

When Robert Signer lost his kayaking companion, he tried to make sense of it, but when he found that he couldn’t he started creating what he called “action sculptures” to help him (along with those viewing them) go inside themselves, into a kind of meditative place, where instead of providing answers to impossible questions “meanings flow into one another effortlessly, without ever taking definite shape,” thereby offering a semblance of peace.

It’s akin to the facility that science-fiction writer and all-around-sage Ursula K. Le Guin was describing when she said once:

_{“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”}

—in other words, in times like we’re in today.

Why has another child needlessly been killed in a refugee boat, border war or neglectful home?

Why did the flood sweep away this family or that village?

Why do the venal and wicked always seem to triumph over the honest and virtuous?

Why did my kayaking companion fail to return, but I did?

Then I asked:

How can we learn to sit with questions like these without sadness or remorse, anxiety or recrimination?

Where in our lives and work would finding relief from these gnawing discomforts be possible?

Could it be within our least engaging and most boring activities every day?

Well, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel wanted me to believe. He’s the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and (to my surprise) he’s been thinking and teaching others about the liberating effects of boredom for more than 20 years. McDaniel talked about the theory and his own experience testing it out on a podcast that I listened to this week.

I wouldn’t have thought of boredom—and in particular doing the kinds of things that we associate with it—as an escape hatch “from stress and darkness,” but for some reason I started playing closer attention as he started to explore the linguistic roots of the word “boring.”

The word’s root is “to bore,” of course, like putting a hole in a container and (by doing so) “rendering it useless” because it can no longer hold what it was intended to hold. In other words, it’s still a vessel, just not one that can also do something else, like hold water. In much the same way, many of our daily activities are similarly without much broader “use,” particularly when we refuse to fill them with some higher agenda, like “being more productive.”

When simply done “for their own sake” with no broader purpose, boring activities can be “incredibly liberating” according to McDaniel, allowing us to find simple relief in the task itself and not in what we’re getting done or producing. As a result, activities that are “boring” and effectively “useless” in this positive sense can trigger “a new beginning, a reset,” as he calls it, from the negativity that regularly weighs us down.

It’s a principle that’s been institutionalized for centuries by Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia where McDaniel studied as a student. Their days (and his) were consumed with tasks, repeated daily (like sweeping the same path or washing the day’s fruits and vegetables) that allowed them to empty their minds of everything beyond the task itself—like “boring a hole in yourself” and letting the extraneous out. Instead of aiming to do more, the point of boring/repetitive activities is actually to do less. In essence, McDaniel and the monks he was learning from found escape in boredom, or the repetitive monotony that characterizes many of our days too–at least when we refuse to compound the monotony with worry.

To somebody like me, who often feels overwhelmed by a 24/7 overload of “bad news” and my inability to absorb (let alone respond to) even a portion of it, hearing about an escape into boredom sounded like Relief. It was then that McDaniel started talking about how our brains “crave nothingness, crave non-productivity.” Stepping back from his remarks, I recalled making a similar point in a post from a couple years back called We Don’t Have to be Productive All the Time. But what McDaniel gestured towards was something that had been more elusive back then, namely, the potential cure that was offered by the non-productive activities that I perform all the time in the course of living and working.

It’s the every-day boredom of tasks at home: the cleaning, dressing, washing, eating, shopping, mowing the lawn, taking the dog out. It’s the daily boredom of tasks at work: research, writing, emailing, calling, meeting, promoting, monitoring information flows. All of these tasks have a repetitive monotony in them. To find their relief, I just need to strip them of their larger goals, objectives, the anxieties that I’m (somehow) not meeting them, and everything else I might be worrying about.

It really is like turning all the charging switches off while leaving the boring one on.

During his podcast appearance, McDaniel gave a beautiful illustration of this healing kind of boredom, and as he recounted it I realized he was talking about something he clearly does himself.

As a chaired professor at a prestigious university, his book-filled office likely hosts many “highly charged” but also “anxiety inducing” activities that could benefit greatly from the relief of a little boredom. For example, the students who visit it may want an “A” in his course, his endorsement for an internship, or a letter of recommendation that will flatter them when the time comes. As a professor, he might be hosting an ambitious colleague seeking tenure, a rival being competitive, or the professional pressure to do more impactful research himself. What all of these purposeful acts have in common, said McDaniel, is “do, do, do.”

But at that point in the podcast, he tried to offer us the same view that he simultaneously has of the books on his office’s bookshelves. “Who cares what’s in them,” he exclaimed (without the reverence I might have expected from a scholar.) What I do sometimes is “just look at them, and all the variety of the colors on their covers.” At that point I realized, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel can be found doing in his office sometimes, particularly when his brain “craves non-productivity” and all the “do, do, do” that’s around him needs “a reset.” In these intervals, hiis books don’t have the higher purpose of scholarship or greater wisdom but simply the boredom of covers with many colors.

To me, this everyday and always-available peace is not unlike what Roman Signer is also offering in another one of his kayak-related installations.

Good luck with the boredom this week! I’ll see you next Sunday.

This post was adapted from my October 8, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Best Gifts Are A Shared Experience

July 23, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When you’ve lived in a place a long time, you accumulate.

There are all kinds of reasons for valuing something enough that you’ve kept it around.

But one downside of this was revealed to me last winter when relatively warm days were followed by a couple of frigid ones which caused a pipe to freeze and then burst behind some floor-to-ceiling shelves that I’d packed full of “things to keep.”

This geyser-fueled alarm bell gave rise to several reactions at the time: relief when my trusty plumber answered the call; irritability when removing the mess of water; and clarity when I realized that most of the stuff I’d set out to dry like treasured cod or leaves of tobacco just had to go.

With some headway into spring yard-work under my belt, I’ll be turning to these shelves and their contents this week. Who’d appreciate 20 clay pots, a serious set of weights, or TVs that have fallen behind the curve? Only one thing is clear: by sometime next week, they’ll all be headed someplace else.

Mine is a fairly common situation, I suspect. How do I get this stuff that I’ve valued enough to keep to those who’ll appreciate having it at least as much–in other words, where there’s enough gratitude around the transaction to benefit us both? As it turns out, while I’ve been in the middle of this quandary, I’ve also been corresponding with a life-long friend who’s discovered that he only has a few months to live. So I’ve also been thinking about how we pass along “what we’ve valued” in a spirit of mutual appreciation towards the end of our lives too.

Coincidentally, a piece called “You Can’t Take It With You” crossed my transom this week. It seems that a couple of trusts-and-estates profs at Yale Law School conducted the first national survey that asked Americans “how they would divide their property among relatives, friends and others if they were to pass away immediately.” Not surprisingly, a survey like this tells us a lot about the people we actually care about during our lifetimes and how we’d like to provide for them when we’re gone.

It turns out that what we thought we knew about these matters was pretty limited before this survey.

Most of the information about how people pass along their property comes from the wills of deceased people that have gone through probate [in state court systems]. But that’s a very biased sample — people with wills are very different from people without wills. Also, wills don’t tell us anything about any of the most complex and interesting family situations because they don’t contain enough information. [For example,] wills can’t tell us anything about how often people make gifts to their stepchildren or nonmarital partners…

According to a companion piece in the Wall Street Journal, 54% of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2021 that they don’t have wills at all. And this isn’t just poor or middle-income people. Apparently one in five Americans with assets of $1 million or more don’t have wills indicating how they want their property to pass. In other words, if you die “intestate,” state law will determine who inherits whether that’s where you want your assets to go or not. Among other things, someone living with you outside of marriage may get kicked out of your house when you’re no longer around to prevent it, while relatives you thought you’d written off years ago could be surprised by unexpected gifts along with the tax payments that go with them.

The Yale survey also indicated just how widely peoples’ expectations around inheritance tend to vary. For example, Black-Americans, the poor and less well-educated, along with women in general told the pollsters that they would give less to their spouses and more to their children than others. Many of those contacted also stated that there were un-related people in their lives that they’d like to provide for after they die. Once again, the law in most states won’t recognize wishes like these if the deceased has failed to include them in “a last will and testament.”

Another issue that the Yale researchers pointed out was that American viewpoints “gathered by pollsters on the spur of the moment,” are likely to change if there were more time to think about their answers. (In other words, maybe the wife would have second thoughts about the financial needs of that grumpy guy in the other room who’s dribbling on himself while watching reruns of Matlock.) Instead of policy changes that involve tinkering with state laws on inheritance to match spur-of–the-moment preferences, the better course might be for each of us to think though our wishes in these regards with legal advisors and those that we care most about before we die.

But since too few of us want to confront end-of-life realities, there’s no indication in the survey data or otherwise that people are rushing to ensure that their resources will go where they want them to go when they’re no longer around to make those decisions for themselves.

One way around this avoidance may be passing along “far more of what we value most” while we’re still alive and the beneficial glow around our gift-giving can be shared with the recipients.

I’ve written about gift-giving on this page before.

For example, when the Sachler family was being excoriated for fueling the opioid crisis with their company’s lust for profits, it seemed appropriate to comment on how they attempted to cloak their avarice with a veneer of civic-minded responsibility by donating millions for naming rights at various art museums and academic institutions. In fact, just this week, theTimes reported that Oxford University joined others in short-circuiting this honor by “de-naming” another Sachler building. (If Jeffery Epstein had lived long enough or Harvey Weinstein had gotten farther in his defense we might have been over-hearing more of these give-and-take-back debates.)

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a post called “The Art of Passing Along What We Value.” It began with stories about giving people things they saw while visiting and admired, and how I’d been thrilled by some early-in-life gifts that had been given to me under similar circumstances. I thought at the time:

When someone else’s interest meets an object of your affection, the best time to move it into some new hands might be now.

Because spur-of-the-moment giving and receiving can feel that good.

And because we also tend to accumulate a lot of treasure, we cannot (and perhaps should not) keep all of it

From there, the post explored an essay called “The Unbearable Heaviness of Clutter” and it’s advice on avoiding “over-attachment” to our stuff. What interested me most wasn’t the hoarding phenomenon but how and why we attach significance to particular things. I concluded at the time that while “weak attachments” (like to an article of clothing) can be broken by employing one or another clever tactic (like having someone else hold up the item while asking “do you need this?), an equally affective solution might be keeping your attachment to the item in tact and simply transferring it to someone else who will value it is as much if not more than you do.

[S]ince whatever-it-is was never stripped of its [personal] meaning, the depth of the generosity around the giving and receiving of it is often felt-all-around.

The post concluded with a giving strategy I was less familiar with, namely Bill Perkin’s advice about how to (according to the title of his 2020 book) Die With Zero. He urges a level of intentionality “around passing along what you have” that goes far beyond writing a will.

While I go into it more deeply in the post, Perkin’s advice arises from the fact that each season of our lives is blessed with different abilities and resource requirements. He proposes a formula for adjusting the amounts that we spend/give and save accordingly, so that by the end of our lives we’ve experienced the fullness of every season (and maybe helped others to do so as well) while reaching the finish line with essentially nothing left over beyond a life-well-lived.

He persuasively argues that with regular adjustments to your giving-and-saving strategies, it’s possible to lead the experience-rich life that many of us aspire to but too few of us have—while perhaps also getting to witness our children or other young people, and even organizations we care about, “fulfill their seasonal mandates too” with assistance we provide while we’re alive and can still enjoy watching them do so.

To those with less discretionary spending and fewer assets to deploy, Perkin’s “seasonally adjusted” advice also makes sense because it encourages us to examine our capabilities and resource requirements at each point in our lives—including those points that we haven’t reached yet and never considered before—such as “how much less we’ll need as we get older.” For him, it’s better to plan a way “to climb the highest mountain” when you’re 30 than regret that you never did so when you’re 70, and careful planning can help you to have the thrill and avoid that regret.

In this, Perkins advocates a kind of gift-giving and receiving between your older and younger self, whatever season of your life you happen to be in.

Gifts that we give to the dead are often in the form of grave-side eulogies or reflections that you write when you’ve had more time to absorb the loss.

Several years ago, I wrote something like this for a cousin I’d travelled to see and essentially say “good-bye” to as Joe’s health declined. I didn’t tell him the things about him that I was most thankful for, but I tried to convey, in a dozen different ways, my respect and affection for him in the hours we spent together—and I think he got the message. But it was only after his passing that I got into the stories we shared that mattered most me.

Here is some of what I wrote afterwards:

My cousin Joe died after a long struggle with illness last week. What was remarkable was the loving peace he somehow found in the midst of those struggles….

I knew him as a man with strong opinions, not suffering fools gladly—even when they happened to be related to him. He could be sarcastic and stubborn, but also playful and funny. I found that you were ‘in’ when he got ‘a kick’ out of you, and I guess he got a kick out of me.

Joe loved sailing, and took me out one windy day in the New Haven harbor. I had dreaded going out a first, fearing the tongue-lashing my minimal boating skills were sure to invite, but had a great time. Joe was in his element when he was out on the water, loved the speed and wind and spray, and his love of it was infectious.

My strongest memory of the man came after my mother died unexpectedly and Joe offered to help me move her stuff out of the apartment where she had been living. ‘Her stuff’ was a surprisingly large amount of what she had accumulated in a suburban house over thirty years and managed to cram from floor to ceiling in various corners of her apartment. Another day I’d been dreading was elevated by sharing it with Joe, as my right-hand man this time around. Stories, jokes, strength, competence, support. What he brought to the endeavor that day provided all the right counters to the sadness, resentment, and exhaustion I was feeling that day. I marveled at the nuance of his caring then and still marvel at it now.

I spent a day with him in Florida after Christmas. I knew I might never see him again and had visited, in part, to say good-bye. While he was surrounded by the paraphernalia that was keeping him alive, I was struck by how Joe was almost aglow with a loving radiance in the midst of it. It was a place beyond acceptance of his poor health. Being glad to see me and pleased at the respect of my visit also didn’t account for it. More than anyone else I have known towards the end of life, Joe had already found a place in his mind and spirit beyond the afflictions of his body and anything non-essential. It was an honor for me to see that— something quite marvelous and blessed about it—a gift that I will take with me as I get older and try to find that place too. What began as a farewell ended in a hopeful glimpse of the future.

Another companion-in-life named Hunter is dying (a continent away) as I write to you today. He may make it to summer, he may not. But I resolved to have the conversation with him that I didn’t have with Joe. And the only way I could accomplish it was by writing a letter to his son and caregiver, asking Nathan to read what I’d written to his father “on a good day.”

Those of you who read this post know I can be “a man of many words” and I’d originally planned to include all or at least parts of my letter to Hunter here today. It’s too long for one thing, and hangs together as a whole, making any excerpt from it a poor representative. But perhaps more importantly, it’s also fresh in its pain and private in its intimacy, making it too early and too close to “put out there” to others just yet.

But I can tell you, it’s a conversation with Hunter that I’m grateful to be having (whenever it actually occurs) because I think I know how he’ll react to each and every part of it, even though the communication between us passes through the grace of his loving son.

In terms of “parting gifts” whether to a total stranger, to your plumber when he admires an artifact in your home, or to a life-long friend whose days are numbered, it is always better, it seems to me, to squeeze as much benefit out of the gift-giving as possible by making what it provides to the gift-giver and its receiver as meaningful as you can for both of you.

– I valued this thing while it “lived” in my house and am grateful (through your thanks upon receiving it) that I’m giving it another home.

– I’ve taken as much enjoyment as I’m entitled to from this book or photo or souvenir. Besides, I have other books and photos and souvenirs, and need fewer of them these days. The season has come for you to enjoy something you’ve admired here full-time, in your home.

– Instead of giving you resources in my will, you’ll have what you would have gotten now, when you’re young enough and vigorous enough to enjoy it—which you probably won’t be 50 years from now, when I finally get probated out of the courts of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

– I want to share the gift of our stories together while you’re alive because we can’t once you’re gone. Then it will truly be a gift to you as well as to me.

This post was adapted from my May 21, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Communion With Our Trash

July 4, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I really don’t want anything more to worry about than I’m worrying about already.

But like you, deep in the reptilian part of my brain I’m alert to threats even though (much of the time) there’d be comfort in being oblivious to them (or, as noted here recently, “choosing to remain blissfully unaware”).

Well disregarding that survival instinct, I finally dove into articles I’ve been accumulating on life forms that are co-habiting with our plastic waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and, far more arrestingly, how all life forms on earth (including these garbage patch creatures) have been ingesting, inhaling and storing micro- and nano-particles of plastic within our bodies for some time now. In a kind of poetic justice for our civilization, it appears that we’re finally being occuped by our own trash.

I originally thought the floating co-existence of other life forms with plastic waste in the middle of the ocean was fascinating. (Maybe we could learn something from them about how to live more successfully on our contaminated planet I wondered.) On the other hand, the notion that plastic particles have been accumulating in my body—and may have been doing so for decades—doesn’t trigger curiosity as much as dread, particularly since there’s no apparent way to get rid of it and we don’t yet understand what this lingering debris is, or isn’t, doing to us. But it’s hard to imagine “anything good.”

(The image above puts its own point on this quandary. Taken by photographer Chris Jordan, it shows a decomposing albatross, with the plastic that remained in this great, sea-going bird’s gut after it perished.)

So what do we do with this way-too-loose-for-comfort knowledge besides inducing a little short-term oblivion to get over the initial shock?

All I have are a bid to raise awareness, made some time ago after life-forms were first discovered co-existing with plastic waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and some sang froid after further realizations more recently.

_{Pictures of Trash Islands currency—created by some cheeky British designers and denominated in units of debris—from when the notion of living with plastic waste was still something that seemed to be happening somewhere else.}

I’ve written about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a couple of times before. In 2017 I was surprised by its discovery and captivated by how some enterprising Brits were calling attention to it with “a product line” that included a Trash Islands passport, postage stamps and various denominations of paper money. As we were to learn later, there were similar garbage patches in each of our planet’s oceans—it just happened that the one in the Pacific was the largest, a “gyre” of plastic waste swirled together by ocean currents that had grown to roughly three times the size of France.

When more information emerged about the life-forms that were accumulating on this debris I wrote about it again—focusing, in particular, on some scientists’ urging us to refrain from removing these islands of plastic until we could learn more about the neuston (or variety of life-forms) that were co-habiting with our debris in this “new” environment. That post was We’re All Caught in This Gyration.

At the time, I guess I couldn’t rule out a future where we (humans) might be able to live with and even thrive along side of our plastic waste too. These neuston might even tell us something about how to do so.

I was also undeterred by The Ocean Clean-up (“TOC”)’s push-back against this wait-and-study approach. TOC was the only organization with boats in the oceans’ garbage patches already, netting and removing as much of the plastic debris as possible, notwithstanding “the Sisyphean nature” of the environmental challenge (since as quickly as they could remove it, more plastic kept being thrown into the oceans to replace it.)

Still, I argued for a pause so we could try and understand what was happening between the life-forms and these plastics because (from a scientific perspective) they were “responding to an alien environment in real time.” Moreover, I thought we should try to do so without pre-conceptions or “new eyes” that might also give us clues about how to better co-exist with our polluted planet going forward. As I wrote at the time:

So if we’re not so different from these tiny creatures clinging to civilization’s debris, what kind of curiosity should we bring to the transitional environment that’s resulted–a place that’s unlike anything we knew in the pre-plastics world where all humans lived only 80 years ago?
…
A plastic-infused environment belongs to these tiny sea creatures as much as it belongs to us and it won’t be disentangled from either of our life cycles anytime soon. Of course we should bring our fullest and richest forms of curiosity to the task of understanding it.

Luckily, TOC also didn’t view its reaction as an either/or. It could get rid of as much ocean plastic as possible while also being curious about the unique accommodations that were happening on top of it. And for those who were worried about the occupying life-forms that were being “collected,” TOC had some strategies to help at least some of them too.

_{Some of the neuston or life forms that were found to be living with ocean plastics.}

Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine have focused on the diversity of sea-life amidst this floating debris and how The Ocean Clean-Up folks (among others) have been studying and protecting them, because as TOC’s work gained greater attention other non-profits and governmental agencies also began to take a greater interest in these plastics-based ecosystems.

Two weeks ago, the Journal reported (here’s a paywall-free link) that NOAA, or America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had found 484 marine invertebrates in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch representing 46 different species. Moreover, most of “these hitchhikers” were coastal species that had apparently found a way to adapt to life out in the open ocean. Despite it being “a food desert for marine life that experiences punishing temperature extremes [close to the surface],” the neuston out there appear to be both growing and reproducing.

The same article quoted Matthias Egger, a scientist at TOC, talking about how the neuston are faring amidst the plastic:

’They’re having a blast [and] that’s really a shift in the scientific understanding.’

[For example,] anemones like to protect themselves with grains of sand Dr. Egger went on to say, but out in the garbage patch they are covered in seed-like microplastics. Moreover, squeeze one of them and the plastic shards spew out, he said: ‘They’re all fully loaded with plastic on the outside and inside.’

A piece in Wired this week elaborated on TOC’s and Dr. Egger’s responses not only to this brave new world but also to their initial efforts to remove as much of it from the oceans as possible. It’s headline summarizes the problem this way: “Patches of floating plastic are teeming with life, and cleanup companies hauling trash out of the water risk destroying an aquatic habitat.”

In response to this criticism, we’re told that Eggers and other TOC scientists are sampling the surface water around their clean-up operation on a weekly basis “to compare the composition of neuston, to understand which species to look out for, what effect the clean-up system has [on them]. and whether there are seasonal differences in how many neuston are present.” TOC expects to announce its findings about these and other aspects of this “aquatic habitat” shortly.

In the meantime, TOC is also trying to save as many of these life-forms as possible by revamping its netting process to give anything alive that it catches multiple chances to escape. (One worry is that if large amounts of neuston are killed, it could have a negative impact on the turtles, fish, seabirds and other animals that eat them.) So TOC has increased the mesh size of the nets to allow at least some of these creatures (like blue buttons and violet snails) to pass through their nets while continuing to capture the plastic waste. In addition, TOC is moving its nets:

slowly through the water to allow mobile species to swim away. There are lights and acoustic deterrents, underwater cameras to detect protected species such as sea turtles, and escape hatches on the underside of nets for animals that get caught. [In addition,] before hoisting the nets aboard, the crew leaves them in the water for up to an hour to give animals time to escape.

Still, some marine life remains with the plastic waste that is removed. And even for the successful escapees, the future could be complicated. Will they continue “to thrive” with plastic particles throughout their bodies or will the consequences for them be far more dire?

_{Harmful consequences for tiny sea-creatures in the middle of the ocean may be difficult to contemplate, but we’re even less willing to consider what might happen to us when these plastic micro-particles enter our bodies.}

Mark O’Connell begins his recent, harrowing essay in the New York Times (here is another paywall-free link) by contending that our bodies are just as suffused with microplastics as the bodies of the anemones in the oceans’ garbage patches. (And from the limited research I have done—including consulting the authorities he cites—there seems to be little dispute about it.)

There is plastic everywhere in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and in our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us. We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink and the food we eat, and even in the air that we breathe. We don’t know, yet, what it’s doing to us, because we have only quite recently become aware of its presence; but since we’ve learned of it, these ingested plastics have become a source of profound anxiety.

Maybe it’s nothing; maybe it’s fine. Maybe this jumble of fragments — bits of water bottles, tires, polystyrene packaging, microbeads from cosmetics — is washing through us [eventually] and causing no particular harm. But even if that were true, we’d still have the impact of knowing that there is plastic waste in our bodies. This knowledge registers, in some vague way, as apocalyptic; it has a whiff of divine vengeance, sly and poetically appropriate. Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own trash.

(In addition to lending this post its title, O’Connell also pointed me towards the Chris-Jordan albatross photo that announces it.)

When I read his essay this week, his words hit me like the biblical Jeremiah’s. O’Connell believes that by recklessly consuming our planet, trashing it with our throw-aways, and naively assuming that there will be no consequences when all of this trash breaks down, we plainly deserve whatever it is that comes back to haunt us.

On the other hand, (like with the neuston’s uncertain fate) O’Connell readily admits that neither he nor the scientific community knows what these internalized particles of plastic are doing to us—if anything—in the long run. At the same time however, he brings more than his outrage and his eloquence to his assessments.

Some of the power of his essay comes from the fact that he’s been a kind of canary in this particular coal mine. O’Connell suffers from I.B.D, a chronic autoimmune condition. While not life threatening, it periodically saps him of energy, sometimes making him unable to work for weeks at time. His suffering led him to discover a 2021 study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology that found significantly higher levels of micro-plastics in the bodies of I.B.D. sufferers than in the rest of us, although he adds that only circmstantial evidence as opposed to “direct causation” was established.

But to add to the coincidence as it relates to humans, O’Connell also mentions scientific studies on the harmful impacts of micro-plastics on sea-life from 2018 (documenting lower growth and reproduction in fish), 2020 (changes in fish behavior), and just last month (intestinal tract disease in seabirds). But again these are early trials, none involved human subjects, and the causal links that were identified were tenuous when they were made at all.

So nothing is conclusive, but there is more than enough to feed our apprehensions. And then there is the rough justice that comes from realizing that, at last, we may be reaping what we have sown. As O’Connell writes in his powerful conclusion,

[T]he idea that we are eating our own purchasing power, that we might be poisoning ourselves with our insistent consumerism, burrows into the unconscious like a surrealist conceit.

From this vantage point, could the sea-life in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch really be “having a blast”?

And it seems even harder to look at ourselves—now effectively in their place—with new, fresh and anything like shame-free eyes.

Will our culpability help or hurt the ways that we’ll respond?

This post was adapted from my May 7, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Common Beat

June 4, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve been finding lately that the biggest obstacle to feeling the common beat is other people.

It’s just easier to imagine sharing the rhythm and release—that universal correspondence environmentalists always wax-on about—when it’s all of the other living things and people aren’t involved. Just the animals that hop, the birds that soar, the fish that ride the waves and the trees that are always reaching towards the sun: you wouldn’t call any of them mean, selfish or lost in their petty concerns. They all know (all the time) that they need “the rest of their world” to live and thrive, as I was reminded in a brilliant episode of Nature this week called “Soul of the Ocean.” But we’ll get to that….

I was in John’s yoga class this week and finding it even more of a blessing than usual after way too much work (“Thanks, man!”). He began, as he always does, with a reading to pull us from the preoccupied places we’d brought with us to where he always hopes to take us. This is some of the bridge that he thought might help us out last Thursday, from The Book of Awakening:

If you place two living heart cells from different people in a Petrie dish, they will in time find and maintain a third and common beat. (Molly Vass) This biological fact holds the secret of all relationship. It is cellular proof that beneath any resistance we might pose and beyond all our attempts that fall short, there is in the very nature of life itself some essential joining force. This inborn ability to find and enliven a common beat is the miracle of love. This force is what makes compassion possible, even probable. For if two cells can find the common pulse beneath everything, how much more can full hearts feel when all excuses fall away?

This drive toward a common beat is the force beneath curiosity and passion. It is what makes strangers talk to strangers, despite the discomfort. It is how we risk new knowledge. For being still enough, long enough, next to anything living, we find a way to sing the one voiceless song. Yet we often tire ourselves by fighting how our hearts want to join, seldom realizing that both strength and peace come from our hearts beating in unison with all that is alive.

I know, I know. This sort of thing is for the chanting voices, murmuring drums and free-floating love in a yoga room, not for life on Philadelphia’s “Blade Runner”streets, where we’re hitting and running and shooting the life out of our neighbors except, of course, when the Eagles are on TV. (It’s worth noting here that “in an earlier life,” John had been a police officer.)

Because this post is about the kind of heart that yearns to beat with all the others that are alive, and further, because Valentine’s Day will be giving us its own version of that before too many more days, I thought of another attempt to capture the common beat in this City.

At the Franklin Institute, which is our science museum, there’s been (since the year after I was born) a Giant Heart that (at 28-feet wide and 18 feet high) is said to be big enough to fit into a 220-foot tall person. For several of the decades that followed, it was a rubbery cavern where streams of school children would relieve themselves until its smell became so intolerable that “a deep cleaning” was performed and a new advertising campaign was launched—as you can see at the top of this page.

Pictures of that Giant Heart itself follow as we explore (first) how living things have often evolved into finding the common beat in nature and (last) how supposedly lower forms of life can coral supposedly higher forms of life into doing their bidding because both have come to embrace that we’re all “in this” together and might as well help one another out when called upon to do so.

There are a million examples in nature that show us how we can flourish by sharing instead of destroying the world around us. But we’ll have to broaden the limited reading of human advancement that we’ve enshrined in our ideologies and other excuses to truly see them.

In an interview in the Times this week, author (Braiding Sweet Grass) and scientist Robin Wall Kemmerer chastened capitalists generally, and (I think) American capitalists in particular, when she said:

Unquestionably the contemporary economic systems have brought great benefit in terms of human longevity, health care, education and the liberation to chart one’s own path as a sovereign being. But what are the costs that we pay for that? ….We have to think about more than our own species, that these liberatory benefits have come at the price of extinction of other species and extinctions of entire landscapes and biomes, and that’s a tragedy.

Can we derive other ways of being that allow our species to flourish and our more-than-human relatives to flourish as well? I think we can. It’s a false dichotomy to say we could have human well-being or ecological flourishing. There are too many examples worldwide where we have both, and that narrative of one or the other is deeply destructive and cuts us off from imagining a different future for ourselves.

Another concept besides “freedom” that includes our aspirations as well as punishments is “survival of the fittest.” While the concept has unquestionable evolutionary benefits, ever since “forward thinkers” dragged it under the canopy of Social Darwinism it has also produced tragedies, including thinking that our dominance, subjugation and pillage are the necessary (collateral) damages for our social advancement. But in addition to motivating centuries of conquest, colonialism, and “milking of the Earth,” the continuous need to demonstrate that “we’re the fittest” has also given us the distorted picture that we’re only operating in the ways that Mother Nature does.

The problem is: the natural world doesn’t operate in this one-sided way and never has, however much we want to anthropomorphize its internal dynamics to feel greater comfort about our own means and ends.

In a recent book called Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World, science writer Kristin Ohlson takes our mistaken alignment with this social theory on directly:

Even many scientists don’t grasp how pervasive cooperative interactions are in nature. Consequently, we seem to have developed a zero-sum view of nature, suggesting that whatever we take . . . comes at the expense of other living things and the overall shared environment.

To challenge this self-serving view, Ohlson cites the remarkable “give-and-take” that happens throughout nature, including in the soil that’s as close as our back or front yards. Microbes, fungi, wild flowers, scrubs and trees not only share nutrients and dispose of waste, they also message one another via neural-like networks that actually “challenge what we mean by cognition.” Reading this I was reminded of the new “Avatar” movie and (like in the original) its subsurface webs of mutual aid, support and resilience that the colonists missed until they “crossed-over” into the natural world. While Darwin himself hardly needed reminding, Ohlson introduces the rest of us to one of his contemporaries, Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin, who wrote the following at the same time that Social Darwinism was on the rise:

Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another? We at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.

Fittness, then, is more complicated than simply surviving or coming out on top. It also includes a great deal of cooperation.

If you still have any doubt, I recommend the visual and (sometimes) spoken-word feast of Nature’s “Soul of the Ocean” episode this week. (Here’s a link to watch this “never-before-seen look at how life underwater co-exists” on whatever viewing device you happen to be using.)

This nature documentary invites us “to dive into a better world.” It’s a place where “everywhere you look, fish aren’t eating one another but cleaning each other.” There seems to be “an older alchemy” where all of the inhabitants are playing in a vast game with rules that hold the entire playing field in a delicate balance. Some of it is “surely the ancient biochemistry of cooperation.”

My favorite examples included the colorful goby fish who maintains a permanent relationship with a tiny shrimp “that does its housecleaning” during their lifetimes together. (Off the coast of the Philippines where they live, it’s said that one has never been seen without the other.) In other examples, each clown fish has “its own” stinging anemone for protection, and species of fan coral have their own identically-colored species of seahorses. A carrier crab gives a poisonous urchin a ride, perhaps for additional protection, while in a gorgeous sequence on traveling jellyfish streaming long tentacles behind them we get a glimpse of “a delicate medusa fish” hitching a ride “in a fragile mobile home”—or maybe something else is going on, since we can never stop understanding nature through our excessively human ways of looking at things.

Nor do all examples of mutuality in nature seem fair, or fully balanced. Just because cooperation is needed to maintain the overall harmony, one party in a shared arrangement may have the far easier job—and it’s often not the one you’d expect who ends up “running things.”

_{“Make sure you all visit the bathroom before going inside.”}

It’s easier for us to imagine that when one party in nature seems to come out on top while the other seems to be working “much, much harder,” the over-worker must be staying in the relationship out of “love,” or at least some “alchemy” or “biochemistry” that we still can’t totally fathom. Such is the case with a parasitic plant that gets a rare island rabbit to continuously do its evolutionary bidding, a startling new story that’s still revealing its secrets somewhere on the Amami Islands off the coast of Japan.

The plant is balanophora yuwanensis (no friendly name has yet been given, so just “BY” for now). It’s a bundle of “strange, red globes” that (straight out of “Avatar”) look like “strawberries crossed with red cap mushrooms.” Instead of producing the energy that it needs from photosynthesis, BY leaches its sustenance from the roots of other plants, making it parasitic by nature. The developing mystery involves how BY—with bad tasting seeds and no wind to carry them about—has managed to propagate itself throughout these remote Islands.

Enter the only dark-furred rabbit in the world (called, somewhat unimaginatively, the Amami rabbit.) This past week, two Japanese scientists documented “an evolutionary bargain” in which the root-sucking BY gives food in exchange for this rabbit’s seed dispersal services, an arrangement “that [apparently] has never been documented between a mammal and a parasitic plant” before.

Nocturnal filming allowed the scientists to capture Amami rabbits regularly chowing down on BY’s less-than-appetizing “strawberries” and “red caps.” Meanwhile, a follow-up investigation revealed that considerably more viable seeds were able to pass through these rabbits’ digestive systems than those of other seed-consuming rabbits. As if that weren’t enough, the Amami species conveniently likes to burrow (and release the BY’s seeds) at the base of large trees and close to a new host plant’s roots (or exactly the food source that baby BYs will need access to).

“In other words,” according to these scientists, “the rabbits’ dropping patterns are less random [and infinitely more desirable] in the evolutionary eyes of the parasites.” Unfortunately for us, while revealing this extraordinary example of inter-reliance between species, the research has yet to explain why Amami rabbits are attracted to these unappealing seeds in the first place, or agreed to do almost all of the work in this admittedly unusual relationship.

Now imagine (if you can) a similar example of cross-species reliance where the supposedly less sophisticated species somehow convinces the more sophisticated one to do its bidding. In this scenario, Wally the resident terrier, who’s playing the role of the dominating plant, somehow convinces the author to play the gullible, hard-working rabbit in yet another “evolutionary bargain.”

As I’ve eluded to in recent posts, Wally has been suffering from a serious digestive aliment and it’s been requiring higher amounts of medication (including steroids) to kick the nasties out of his system. The meds also make him thirsty and drink far more water than usual. Well this past week began a life-on-steroids regime that involves my taking him outside to pee every few hours (whether I’m asleep or not) if I wish to avoid accidents in the bed (his preferred place for sleeping, of course) or elsewhere. How did my little guy negotiate this evolutionary advantage I wonder as I stagger down the stairs every night at 12, 3 and 6 am, put on my parka and brave the sub-freezing temperatures in order to “accommodate the two of us”?

In other words, how did another “plant” convince his “rabbit” to do this?

I guess it brings me back to John, The Book of Awakening, the Franklin Institute’s “love our heart” promotion, all the LOVE that’s wafting around this “brotherly love” kind of city, as well as the “older alchemy” and “ancient biochemistry” of cooperation that exists among species in nature. When two hearts beat side by side, at some point they become “a common beat” that makes cooperation, compassion and (yes) even Love possible.

Through all of his life Wally has done everything that his pure little heart can do for me so, of course, I’ll endeavor to do the same for him. While I’ve not always been happy to be “the rabbit to his plant” this week, I also can’t imagine acting in any other way.

This post was adapted from my February 5, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.