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.

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.

Some food for thought (if you find that you’re hungry for it today) from Yvon Chouinard.
 
(He pronounces his name yuh-vaan shwee-naard if you’re wondering.)
 
Throughout, I’ll just call him Yvon, because he seems to invite that kind of familiarity with his plain-speaking forth-rightness. 
 
I’m going to be excerpting some quotes from a recent interview for you to chew on, while adding a few of the associations I made from his storytelling, although I encourage you to listen to what he has to say because you’ll know what I mean about “his plain-speaking and forthrightness” the moment you hear the sound of his voice.
 
When you see Yvon’s name you might expect French Academy, but when you hear him introducing himself it’s pure Lewiston Maine, which is where he was born from stock that likely wandered down from somewhere around Quebec. That’s why, maybe confounding our expectations, he comes across as a salt-of-the-earth American.
 
So if you haven’t heard of him or recognize him from his picture, who is this guy anyway?
 
Yvon’s interview, called “Giving It All Away,” was recorded just before Thanksgiving and I heard it just before I edited and sent out last Sunday’s post. The interview title speaks to the fact that he gave away the entirety of his billion-dollar company earlier this year in an unprecedented act of philanthropy. But perhaps even better, Yvon has been “giving it all away” for most of his life, spending himself in ways that I can only imagine.
 
So I guess if there’s nutrition to be found in his words, it comes from the arc of his remarkably fertile life and thinking about how we’ve lived and continue to live while he tells us about who he is and what he’s been doing.
 
Yvon Chouinard is the founder of outdoor clothing and sporting goods company Patagonia. In many people’s minds, the company is almost synonymous with sustainable manufacturing practices and products, protecting wild places (most notably in Patagonia itself, which comprises the southernmost tip of Argentina and Chile), and creating a kind of “hive mind” brand of enlightenment in the company’s workspaces. 
 
Moreover, while striving “to do good,” Patagonia has also consistently ticked off that other big box when it comes to American success stories, namely profitability. Yvon’s company (until recently, solely owned by him, his wife and two kids) will bring in an estimated $1.5 billion in revenues in 2022.
 
So what does he have to say for himself?

_{Some outdoorsmen and women that Patagonia corralled into wearing clothing from its “shell” line of sportswear in a recent mail-order catalog.  On top of everything else, it’s about looking good and having fun while pushing one’s mental and physical limits.}

The interview begins with Yvon’s “changed my life” story. This 81-year-old tells us that he was a “serial climber” early-on, which his poor parents interpreted as something that was pretty grounded until they were watching a local news program in California, where they lived at the time, and the news clip shows (in his words): 

a helicopter coming by the North American wall of El Capitan [in Yosemite National Park]. And then it zooms in on these guys hanging from hammocks underneath this big overhang 2000 feet up. And one of ’em is their son. They always thought when I said I was going climbing that I was [just] going hiking.

So boy were they surprised, but he’d already been “a serial climber” for years (which shows, among other things, how little parents know about what their kids are doing) explaining: “I’d spent two years just climbing cracks. I’d spent five years just climbing big walls, like in Yosemite. I’d spent years and years learning ice climbing.” And eventually all that verticality and danger took him to the Himalayas, to a fateful climb that ended in an avalanche, to him somehow surviving while others in his company did not, and to how he felt about the bookends of his existence from that point forward. 

[I]t kind of changed my life. I’ve had a lot of close calls, near death experiences, but always afterwards you go around sniffing the flowers and being really happy to be alive and everything…but after that climb, all of us were deeply depressed for several months afterwards, and I’ve read stories about people that have kind of died and come back and you resist coming back. And in fact, it’s taught me that there’s nothing to fear about death itself. It’s a pretty pleasant feeling [when you find yourself face to face with it].

I heard it as a kind of relief, a comfort, once you glimpse that just as much as living, an ending “without fear “also belongs to you. 
 
For the sake of his parents and his own growing family, Yvon cut back on extreme climbs after that, but the experience allowed him to settle into his life in a whole different way. “[Y]ou know, when my time comes, I’m gonna go out pretty peacefully.”

At first, I wondered how he could be so sure about that.
 
I’d already been reading a new book by Susan Cain, who is most famous for her TED talk and a previous book about introverts. She calls this new one “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.” It reminded me of the lengths our culture goes to minimize or hide sorrow, suffering and death even though all of them are universal experiences. So I could understand that when he was taken to a cliff edge by an avalanche at the top of the world, Yvon came to a kind of acceptance that his end was now as much a part of his journey as his moving-on from there, that there was a kind of peace that was waiting for him beyond the physical experience, and that there was a tremendous sense of relief in that deep-seated knowledge.
 
At this point in the interview, I wondered where I’d found that kind of confidence in the limits of my playing field.

I also marveled at how Yvon described finding his career path. It’s been a preoccupation of mine in several posts (for example, Why We Gravitate Towards the Work That We Do) as well as a theme in my book writing.

I never wanted to be a businessman. I was a craftsman and I was a climber. And I just, every time I’d go into the mountains, I’d have ideas on how to make the gear better. The gear was pretty crude in those days. It was all made in Europe. So I just got myself a forge and an anvil and a book on blacksmithing, and I taught myself how to blacksmith. And that led to making these pitons and eventually ice axes. And crampons and all the gear for mountain climbing and never did it thinking that it was a business. It was at first it was just making the stuff for myself and friends and then friends of friends. And pretty soon I’m making two of these pitons an hour and selling ’em for a dollar and a half each. Well, not too, not too profitable, right? I kind of backdoored becoming a businessman.

I’m sure this sounds more home-spun than it actually was, but meeting his own needs and the needs of his outdoorsy friends was clearly the initial spark. It prompted me to replay my own journey from Perry Mason to courtroom, grade-school Show & Tells to writing in public. (For all of these reasons, if you have a few moments to spare after you finish here, I’d love to hear about the sparks that brought you to the work that you ended up doing too.)
 
When Patagonia (the company) got to the deliberation phase of its business, it had already begun to lose its way. Demand was growing faster than the company’s capacity to meet it, so Yvon had an extended conversation with his key collaborators about what was most important to them in moving the company to the next level. Those priorities grounded a kind of business philosophy that became Yvon’s 2005 memoir, “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman.”

I mean the name of my book is ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ cuz we have a policy. If your child is sick, go home, take care of ’em, uh, no matter what. I don’t care when you work, as long as the job gets done and if the surf comes up, drop everything, go surfing. None of us liked authority. We really disliked authority and none of us wanted to tell other people what to do. So our management system is kind of like an ant colony. You know, an ant colony doesn’t have any bosses. The queen just lays there and lays eggs. There’s no boss in an ant colony but every single ant knows what his job is and gets it done. And they communicate by touching feelers, and that’s about it.

I’d call what he describes here the hive-mind of an enterprise. Unfortunately, I’ve only experienced it once, and never in “the regular course” of any business that I’ve been involved with. The notable exception was a school. 
 
Several years ago I was a teacher in a school for autistic kids, some with significant challenges and all with unbelievable amounts of energy. Only in the inspired chaos of this place, with a teacher-to-kid ratio that approached 1-to-1, did I experience anything like Yvon’s collective working spirit, manifested in the “touching feelers” of my co-workers.  
 
The immediacy and aliveness of every working minute at Benhaven School in New Haven reminded me (years later) of how Rebecca Solnit’s described lower Manhattan’s citizen rescuers coming together after 9/11 and NOLA’s citzen rescuers after Hurricane Katrina, exploits that she chronicles in “Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.” As I conjured hive-minds like these, and apparently at Patagonia too, I couldn’t help thinking about all of the other places where I’ve worked over the years and how far they’d fallen short of the workers-paradise (at least to me) that Yvon and some remarkable others have helped to create. 
 
Sustainability is another ground-breaking concept for him. It’s about how you make something, but also (his company believes) what you do as a business once one of your products begin to wear out or your customers just get tired of having them around any longer. 
 
For instance, you show your customers how to repair the zipper on, say, your “Reversible Shelled Microdini jacket” or replace the buttons when they‘ve fallen off your “Organic Cotton Mid-Weight Fjord Flannel Shirt.” And when a Patagonia product’s useful life has ended for you, Patagonia even takes it back to try and refurbish it so somebody else can get a second life out of it too, or recycle it into something else if that’s not possible. Because if you pay a lot for quality from a company like this—instead of for one- or two-season throw-away clothes—shouldn’t that item have serial lives too? 
 
Here’s Yvon again, about the lifecycles that Patagonia is enabling for its products: 

[Some years ago] we did an ad in the New York Times on Black Friday that said, Don’t buy this jacket, and there’s this photo of this jacket and it said, Don’t buy this jacket without thinking twice. Do you really need it? Are you just bored? Uh, and if so, you know, don’t…[So] If they [our customers], if they made a commitment to think twice about purchasing, we were gonna back it up with our own commitment, which was guaranteeing that jacket for life, repairing it when it needed repair. Helping people find another owner for that jacket. And finally, when it’s absolutely shredded and can’t be used at all, we’ll recycle it into more clothing. And so to do that, we had to build the largest garment repair facility in North America. And we have a van going around to colleges and stuff, showing people how to repair clothes and repairing people’s clothing. We produced a bunch of videos on how to sew a button on so people can repair their own stuff. Cause that’s the best thing you can do is to buy the very best thing you can and try to keep it going as long as possible. And so we’re helping people do that.

When I heard him tell this story I was sorry that I’d recently given my first Patagonia, a full-length rain and wind jacket in a beautiful kind of orange (it had been a really big purchase for me at the time) to a church clothing drive instead of returning it to the company for renewal and transition. Because a circular economy like this is a kind of mind-set, a discipline that can be applied to almost everything if it becomes more engrained in our lives “as consumers”–but I’d never even considered what he’s offering here.
 
Yvon talks about many other things in this interview (and in his other interviews and writings and speeches over the years) and you might find it edifying to dive into more of his wit & wisdom as a result. But I want to leave you with one of my favorites from last Sunday’s gabfest, where he somehow manages to combine his first career with his current one—which involves lots of interactions with companies that see things differently and governments that almost always do. 
 
How do you convince these people to change the unsustainable and unhealthy ways that they’re doing things when you’re a powerful company like Patagonia or a powerful individual like its founder? 

I’ll tell you a little story about mountain guiding. There’s two types of mountain guiding. One is democratic where you, you’re guiding somebody up the Grand Teton, which is a pretty safe mountain. And the client starts freaking out. So you pull out your harmonica and you play your harmonica a little bit. You calm ’em down and you kind of, you know, take your time and, and you get up it, a very effective way to guide on a non-difficult mountain. Let’s say you’re guiding on the Matterhorn and you know, you’re 60 years old, and the guide and you got a family. And you know, you remember the client is always out to kill you. A mountain like that, it’s rotten rock. It’s thunderstorms every afternoon. And the client freaks out. The guide screams at him, pounds on ’em, calls them names, tugs the rope and gets ’em to the top. So what happens is the client is more afraid of the guide than the mountain. And that’s basically how we have to treat our government [and many of our corporations].

I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for truth-telling when it’s wrapped up in a musical story like this. 
 
So I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of his words, that you’ll have a chance to listen to Yvon Chouinard saying them too (because the atmospherics he weaves around them simply can’t be duplicated on the page), and that he’s given you some food for thought to take into the days ahead.

_{Yvon Chouinard is 81 today, which puts him in his mid-70s when this picture was taken in March 2016, “on a classic local route somewhere out West during a new hire orientation.”}

Thanks for reading. Have good week. Signing off today as day-vid gr-icing (since I’m told that some people also find my name unpronounceable). 

This post was adapted from my December 4, 2022 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 of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right

While the institutions that serve our most important commitments generally receive our support (or at least our tax dollars), we’re not sustaining the flesh and blood workers who toil within them, too often treating them like disposable assets that are easily replaced–when nothing could be farther from the truth. 

• In our schools, it’s the teachers, administrators and PTA members who aim to assure parents and communities that their children are reaping the benefits of a good education. 
•  In our libraries, it’s the librarians who select and recommend the books that will be available for a community to read.    
•  In our houses of worship, it’s the men and women “of the cloth,” who stand between their congregations and an outside world that’s sorely in need of their faith, hope and love.
•  In our police and military organizations, it’s the officers who try to bridge a community’s desire for safety with the common threats that it faces every day, whether near or far from home. 
•  In our political organizations, it’s the public servants who safeguard our votes and the overall integrity of our governance from the mobs that increasingly threaten them from all directions.

These men and women occupy pivot points between their institution’s lofty commitments and the public’s demand that its interests be served. 
 
Sadly, too many of them are collapsing under the strain of conflicting desires within these same communities.
 
Where does the rising toxicity of this “push and pull” leave these essential workers?   Far too often, it’s hurt, demoralized, disabled.
 
And where does it leave the rest of us when they can’t do their jobs anymore, when “other good men and women” see what happened to them and decline to take their places, when their jobs go unfilled or are taken on by those with far narrower views of the public interest?  
 
Where do their voids leave the rest of us?

_{There are increasingly divided pews in America’s houses of worship.}

I have a personal perspective on one of these pivotal jobs that recently got activated while reading an interview with a pastor who’d been forced to abandon his ministry—and his “calling” in life—because of divisions within his congregation that even his Job-like efforts had been unable to bridge.
 
Before I headed to law school, I studied the history of religion in America as well as ethics in the company of a much larger cohort of men and women who were pursuing careers in the ministry.  “Master of Divinity” was the professional degree they were after as they studied the Old and New Testaments, the rituals of liturgy, the growing competition between psychologists and ministers, and how to give an engaging sermon on Sunday mornings. 
 
It was a “slice of life” that came vividly back to me when I read Dan White’s heart-breaking interview in the New York Times this week. 
 
Fresh in my mind as I read it was a post I’d written back in January called “Turning On The Rescuers.”  You may recall its story about a school superintendent in Joplin Missouri who courageously stepped into the breach after deadly tornados destroyed half of his community’s schools. Although the multi-year rebuilding effort that followed exhausted him, his personal consequences worsened when some disgruntled residents drove him from public office with cruel allegations after their hopes around community rebuilding became mired in frustration. Their attacks made him contemplate suicide and, after a period of recovery, take a new job with an organization that counsels former public officials on how to redeploy their leadership skills after vocal minorities among their constituents undermined them. At the time, he called it “an exclusive club that nobody wants to belong to.”  
 
(Sad to say, it’s a next generation American job if there ever was one:  rehabilitating helpers that are abandoned by their communities when some of its attack dogs turn them into targets.)

These men and women occupy pivot points between their institution’s lofty commitments and the public’s demand that its interests be served. 

Dan White, Jr. wanted nothing more than to bring a community of the faithful together. Originally from upstate New York, he became a Baptist minister in the early 2000’s. After a terrible flood devastated the towns around his church, he deepened his vocation by seizing an opportunity to grow his caring community when he jumped into the recovery effort.

We were going to take care of people who weren’t inside our Christian community… caring about people you wouldn’t actually be friends with [already] and helping them overcome that boundary. And so that was another big moment for me in rallying people to care [about one another].

At the same time, his outreach coincided with growing publicity about sex abuse involving the clergy, with many no longer seeing pastors as “shepherds” as much as “wolves.” After attending some social events and “taking the air out of the room” when he identified himself as a minister, White said he stopped sharing with strangers “that I was a pastor,” for the first time feeling “some shame about having that role.”  
 
He began to re-focus almost exclusively on his congregation and, in particular, on their building of a “multipurpose space” (for youth groups, for refugees, to have a place to gather for coffee) and while the majority of his church supported it, a few were opposed. White thought that limited dissent was normal until some who were against the new space made it personal, threatening to “ruin him” if he went forward with it. These opponents sent a mass email to the entire congregation accusing him of being “a bad leader.” As he later described it:

a little faction of people in our church [contended] that this decision was really just my mastermind psychological skills to convince people to do something they didn’t really want to do with their money.

And I realized at that moment that being a pastor is this really precarious little spot you sit in that people project all of their wants, and needs, and demands, expectations, unrealized hopes onto you. And when you don’t meet them, they are posed with a response. Either they’re going to reject you, or ruin you, or abandon you.

And that’s ultimately what started to settle into my own ministry, was just this fear of being abandoned and losing people, and being interpreted in very villainous, demonizing ways and not knowing how to like — that’s the shame. Not knowing how to get that off me.

Around the 2012 election involving Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney, White began to feel even more demoralized about his commitment to bring people together in a caring community. “A dear friend whom I loved” in the congregation approached him and said that as a conservative, she didn’t feel safe in his church, felt “judged here,” and couldn’t remain “with this kind of judgment.” White apologized profusely, told her “you do belong here,” but couldn’t change her mind. Within days, another couple told him about their need to depart because there was “no space for us here” with their more liberal views. White described how he was “in shock” that people with contrary political perspectives “didn’t think they could belong in the same community. And I didn’t really have words to keep them.” When they left his church, it felt like they were abandoning him too.
 
Matters hardly improved as the next election approached. White characterized it this way: 

the election of Trump just threw battery acid on the whole reality. Where people would never have felt comfortable calling another brother or sister in Christ, you know, a horrible name like a Marxist or a white supremacist or a baby killer, I mean, these things just started to — they were just flowing off people’s tongues when Trump got elected.

And then in 2020 came the pandemic, with new opportunities for divisiveness and demonization, like when a church stops meeting in person to reduce Covid’s transmission or decides to reopen, but with a mask policy.

For White, It had finally become too much.

He appreciated the extent of his downward spiral when he took a vacation with his wife. White was shocked by his need to sleep for long periods. When he was awake, his hands were often shaking so much he suspected Parkinson’s. But neurological testing after he returned to work revealed something else entirely: signs of post-traumatic stress. Except instead of PTSD, which is often connected to the experience of a single violent act, his injury was from the accumulation of trauma he’d experienced over almost 20 years of ministry. 
 
How he’d gotten to this traumatized place became clear after a therapist encouraged him to do “an emotional and relational audit.” With her encouragement, White mapped out: 

people that I had loved that were no longer in my life. I had to name people that had attacked me. And then I also had to name events that I was privy to in people’s lives that were traumatic for them, and I had to be present to them. 

And I mapped out, over a period of 20 years, over 180 people that had come into my life or left in my life. And I had just tucked all of this stuff under the carpet. And what she called it — she’s like these are all little deaths. These are all little deaths that you’ve experienced. And you haven’t grieved [over] any of them.

Instead, he carried the grief and loss inside, and slowly but surely they were breaking him down.

Even with this insight, White was “really having a hard time believing that something I loved” had damaged him this much.  He also knew that he’d probably have to stop being a pastor to escape the trauma, but “I just didn’t want to give up on people, and I love them, and I didn’t want to be a quitter.” 
 
When you are “called” to a career by your convictions but become unable to do it because of factors beyond your control, you can suffer “moral injury,” or the same kinds of trauma that many health care professionals experienced during Covid when they could no longer be caregivers in the ways that they needed to be within an overwhelmed health care system. (I wrote about this previously in “The Moral Injury to Caregivers When They Can No Longer Provide Care.”) 
 
White went on to leave his church, to tears from some in his congregation but also to accusations of abandonment from others in their hour of need, so even as he walked out the door he continued to be torn apart. Without a job, he had the space to realize that he couldn’t be alone among faith leaders in suffering this kind of damage, while also realizing that his colleagues had never talked to him about the destructive forces that were buffeting them. He also searched for, but couldn’t find, a version of the Betty Ford Rehabilitation Center that poorly paid pastors could afford. Mulling over its necessity led White and his wife to open a healing refuge for burned-out pastors, which they run to this day.  

Much like that former school superintendent in Joplin Missouri, White is working to heal moral injuries suffered in a different (but related) corner of the job market. He and his fellow pastors share the experience of being vilified for their efforts to bring people together during divisive times. But the injuries they share go deeper than name-calling and hurt feelings. When members of their congregations could no longer remain, they abandon their pastors as well–a string of “tiny deaths” that need to be mourned before healing can begin.
 
We know that injuries like this are occurring in other “pivotal jobs” too—to our teachers, librarians, school board and PTA members, to our election officials and vote counters, to members of our police forces and to key military personnel—all of whom need to be ready to deliver on our most important commitments while being assailed or abandoned at every turn by those they are struggling to serve.

These beleaguered men and women are a dwindling civic resource, and nearly impossible to replace when they leave public service. 
 
The dog days of August are as good a time as any to think about where we’re headed when it comes to some of the most essential jobs in our communities and what we can (and must) do to shore up the brave individuals who are still bold enough to do them.
 

This post was adapted from my August 7, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (because of reader reactions) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Just as I was starting to settle into a new year, I was seized by this story on the radio.
 
It was about a kind of pattern:  how people who dive into natural disaster recovery–helping to produce miracles while doing so, and being initially heralded as miracle workers by nearly everyone–seem to become, in the months of hard work and challenges that follow, scapegoats for everything that has not been achieved, and eventually a kind of public enemy.
 
These first responders often lose their jobs and the luster (if not more) on their reputations as the community around them frays, becomes less willing to follow anyone’s hopeful lead, the disillusion sets in, the naysayers step up, and fingers of blame get pointed.
 
In this particular story, the arc from celebrating the rescuers to demonizing them was navigated by a heartland community. “The fixes” were to schools destroyed by a deadly tornado and to improving the overall quality of education during rebuilding efforts in a small Missouri city.  Their catastrophe always required group commitment, sacrifice and solidarity—not merely the efforts of a few first-responders—but the community that initially followed their lead and called them heroes melted into disappointment as their efforts fell short of its differing hopes, and many of their fellows eventually turned on them.
 
Somebody has to be to blame, you see.  Surely the shortfalls that followed are not my fault, me and my neighbors, due to our failure to cohere, to bury our selfish interests, or to give our initial “heroes” the benefit of our doubts.  The “mess as we see it” has to be the fault of the folks who jumped into the breach in the first place. 
 
I almost said:  foolishly jumped into the breach. 
 
But what would saying this mean? If the most willing and most able of a community’s possible saviors hesitated–and then stepped back, shaking their heads–when they’d almost joined the rescue effort after an unprecedented weather event, an out-of-control wildfire, too much water or not enough? 
 
What would it mean if good men and women decided that it wasn’t worth the inevitable death threats, the risks to their families and their own mental health, the possible loss of their jobs and reputations if they were to step up and respond to a physical calamity in their community when they might be in the best positions to do so?
 
Would saying “I pass” matter less if the calamity affected everyone’s health (like a pandemic) or the community’s ability to govern itself and fend off chaos (given its political divides)?

Political philosopher Edmund Burke famously said, in a phrase that’s almost become hackneyed in its repetition: 

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.

So what would it really mean if enough good men and women regularly decided that it wasn’t worth the personal costs “of their coming to the rescue” because of the likelihood that their own community would eventually turn on them in personally destructive ways?

_{When the going gets rough, it’s always easier to say “No” than to say “Yes,” and
to continuously put our support behind our initial “Yes.”}

Of course, we’ve seen this movie before.
 
In recent history—which is written from the distance of a half-century or more—few leaders twinkle more brightly than Winston Churchill. 
 
I fell in love with him and his leadership style all over again while I was reading Eric Larson’s recent book about the man behind-the-scenes at Dunkirk and the Blitz—a biographical sketch that was only possible because of newly accessible diaries that had been written by members of Churchill’s family and staff at the time. (Here’s a link to my discussion of that often delightful profile in “Two Books Worth Reading” from around a year and a half ago.)
 
Yet despite Churchill’s ultimately heroic efforts to step into a breach that had been created by flailing national leadership at the dawn of World War II, the British peoples’ gratitude wasn’t deep enough or its memory long enough to continue to back him after the War had been won, and more than his ego suffered as a consequence.
 
Churchill not only lost that post-War election, he became a scapegoat for those who bemoaned the cost in lives and sterling of the War effort, the loss of the British Empire, and once Victory in Europe was declared on VE Day, a “victory” that no longer tasted quite as sweet. 

_{British voters didn’t give him a vote of confidence or help him to guide their country into peacetime. It’s hardly of a stretch to say that they blamed Churchill for everything that hadn’t gone the way that they would have preferred it.}

We’re also seeing this movie today.  Whatever you may think of Anthony Fauci (infectious disease doctor, media personality and CDC spokesman), ask yourselves:  Does any 81-year old man really need daily death threats, to put his family in regular peril, to risk a long and hard-earned reputation for admitting when he’s wrong and helping his country stave off deadly viruses?  In his fall from early hero to current villain in many eyes, what’s most amazing to me is that he hasn’t already said: “To hell with it.” 
 
That’s also what grabbed my attention in the story I was hearing about Joplin Missouri.  Looking back nearly a decade—from disaster in 2011, to interventions by the first responders, to celebrating these individuals as community heroes, and to the mental health toll that followed for so many of them as members of their community proceeded to tear them down—I was struck by what seemed to be the increasingly inevitable “life cycle” of hero-to-villain.
 
Both Churchill and Fauci would surely have identified with these Joplin officials who struggled mightily to help rebuild a mile-wide stretch of town that had been torn to shreds by a deadly, 200-mile-an-hour, so-called “multiple vortex” tornado—only to have too many of these locals eventually turn on them when their post-disaster hopes were frustrated by a lack of funds or a unity of purpose.
 
There’s one more thing that peaked my interest in this story. I’ve spent time in Joplin, Missouri so I felt that I knew at least something about this place and its people. 
 
Some years ago, Joplin was ground zero in a multi-district securities matter that I was involved in as a lawyer. I was headquartered for a month of depositions in nearby Springfield (see The Simpsons) and made a kind of pilgrimage to nearby Joplin, where key players in the alleged investment scheme lived. The cases involved the buying and selling of interests in ethanol plants, ethanol is a by-product of corn, and there are cornfields nearly everywhere in these parts. At the time, I visited Joplin for its silo-full of ethanol entrepreneurs and accountants and because I wanted to know whether their “famous” barbeque was as good as everybody said it was. (“Yes,” to that!)
 
Anyway, the tornado clusters that hit Joplin several years later were devastating to this farming and light industrial community. They killed 158 people outright, injured more than 1100, and caused property damage totaling $2.8 billion, the highest in Missouri’s history. 
 
Joplin’s loss and recovery are also relevant today because of the devastating series of tornados that ripped a 100-mile long path through Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri (just to the south-east of Joplin) less than a month ago. The life-cycles of hero-to-villain are likely just beginning to turn for the first-responders in those near-by communities.
 
Immediately after the Joplin tornado struck in 2011, those with the relevant job responsibilities there immediately stepped up and several were interviewed for the story that followed, including Bryan Wicklund (Joplin’s chief building official, who confronted how ill-prepared the community’s building standards had been); Keith Stammer (the City’s emergency management director who had to coordinate relief efforts and wanted to “think big” when rebuilding); and C.J Huff (the school superintendent who confronted serious damage to more than half of Joplin’s schools). Vicky Mieseler, the executive director of mental health clinics in Joplin, and Doug Walker, a clinical psychologist who travels worldwide helping communities struck by disaster, were also interviewed for this story.
 
Their accounts were as sad as they were striking, Huff’s (the school superintendant’s) story in particular. 
 
Mieseler (the local mental health worker) recalled that the best thing that happened after the tornado struck in May was hearing Huff tell the community’s parents that students would be able to go back to school in August, only three months later.  Given the extent of school building damage and the fact that many students and residents were homeless, his announcement had a stunning impact in countering the community’s despair. 
 
Against the Herculean timeline he set for himself, Huff marshaled local resources and managed to re-open schools in August by building classrooms in abandoned big-box stores. During those early months, he describes himself as “a walking heart attack” as he tried to make the school year happen:

I gained about, gosh, 60 pounds, I think. I’m a stress eater. And we all have our coping mechanisms, and mine was ice cream and lots of coffee – lots of coffee and lots of ice cream.”

It made Huff a local hero, and he soon became a national one too, building on a reputation he’d earned before the tornado by helping to launch Bright Futures, an initiative that brought together the school district, local businesses, faith-based organizations and community members to help meet students’ most basic needs, an effort that had grown to 30 affiliates across several states. 

_{During Huff’s heroic phase: President Obama honored him at a local graduation ceremony one year after the tornado, but as re-building continued and hit the inevitable potholes, his growing notoriety may have worked against him.}

As the nitty-gritty of rebuilding Joplin’s schools continued, growing community push-back began to take a toll on Huff. Doug Morris (the disaster psychologist) says Huff became exhausted and distraught as locals began to fight his proposals, and ultimately him personally, at almost every turn. 

Huff was demonized by some residents. He says he considered suicide….

Those attacks included a Change.org campaign to terminate his employment as school superintendant (the termination petition ultimately gained 486 signatures) and the platform became one of several sounding boards for his opponents. The comments posted there refused to give him any credit for his early accomplishments or much (if any) support for the school rebuilding efforts that he championed:

_{– T Carl: It’s time to take action. CJ Huff has performed gross misconduct in his role as Superintendent of our school system. He is a detriment to our kids, the parents of Joplin’s school children and the taxpayers of Joplin, MO.
 
– Brayden Provins: He’s the worst superintendent the school district has ever had. He’s ran the schools into the ground.
 
– J. Benifield:  I have several grandchildren in the Joplin R-8 school district, with some BULLIED everyday. No one does anything about it and Mr. Huff seems to think there’s “no problem with bullying”….yes, yes there is. These kids don’t need all of this drama from Mr. Huff. His disrespect is deplorable. He needs to focus on the kids AND teachers. We CAN do better}.

_{– Randy Long: He is all for himself and not the kids or the teachers.}

Local mental health worker Miesler said Huff was hardly alone in experiencing these kinds of attacks from Joplin residents. “Several years after the tornado,” she said, “you started to see major change in leadership positions” across the community. In addition to Huff, who went on to resign of his own accord, this included the Joplin’s City Manager among many others. 
 
Huff, who is now working as a disaster consultant, reports that “every single one of his [current] colleagues” is a former public official who was ousted from his or her role after responding to a local disaster.  He went on to lament: 

One of the things I learned is that when emotion and logic collide, emotion wins every time. It didn’t matter what we brought, whether it was data or subject matter experts. It didn’t matter.

And about these former public official and new co-workers, he said with a rueful laugh:

We call it the exclusive club that nobody wants to belong to.

Maybe Huff, the other former leaders in Joplin, and public officials elsewhere who had been ousted after responding to community disasters let their initial status as local heroes go to their heads and started to act arrogantly and unresponsively. But then again, maybe not. I couldn’t gather enough information for this post to know whether Joplin’s post-tornado leaders acted like heroes throughout or devolved into something far less than that. It’s certain that Huff and the others weren’t perfect.
 
But the two mental health experts who spoke in this story did so because they believed that the hero-to-villain life cycle after natural disasters is an increasingly common one today. It apparently happens almost everywhere, with considerable health consequences for the initially acclaimed rescuers. What these mental health experts didn’t say—and maybe didn’t have to—is that it’s not just those who step into the fray during natural disasters. Those who attempt to provide leadership in any kind of community crisis today are likely to face the same retribution and personal health consequences despite being celebrated in the early days as heroes. 
 
No one should jump into the fray of an emergency who isn’t both willing and able to do so. But if you can do it and deep-down want to do it because of your abilities and the extent of your community’s need, will any reasonable person actually “jump in” and “take the lead” if they know what they’re probably “buying” for themselves and their families at the back-end?  

Community members who lack these rescuer’s abilities, track records of service, courage and strength of character can turn on you in a flash, accusing you of serving yourself instead of them, of being incompetent, deplorable and worse. “Sticks and stones,” yes, but their daily assaults can be debilitating, especially when the stakes are high and fewer and fewer around you “seem to have your back.”
 
The shame, of course, is that good men and women—and maybe the best of them—will step back from any kind of crisis leadership, leaving it in the hands of the less able and less bold, or even to charlatans.
 
Perhaps this is what we are already seeing in those who stand for elected office, run our school boards, libraries, and other community organizations: far fewer good people than we need to do our most important public work, because we’re scaring them away before they even get involved.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but increasingly it seems to be.
 

This post was adapted from my January 9, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) 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.

For just about anything you can think of, somebody’s posted a YouTube video to show you how. 
 
It’s like we’ve moved Dad on-line and then made him available to everyone. Literally.
 
I tuned in to one of them, Rob Kenny and his “Dad, How Do I?” tutorials, because one of you thought that I should. (Thanks, Brian!)  Dad, how do I tie a tie? Dad, how do I shave? Dad, how do I fix my running toilet? 
 
That last one’s had 1.1 million views, so lots of us “kids” are watching.
 
Rob Kenny’s advice is sincere, never scrambled with snark but always accompanied by a mayonnaise of Dad jokes that make him break up a little when he tells them, pulling you into their vibe even though you can’t remember ever thinking that jokes like this were funny. They pull you into a heartland kind of conspiracy, like the “just-right porridge” did in the wandering fairy tale.  
 
You see, Rob Kenny lost his dad when he was a kid and it made him realize that other kids had lost (or never had) their dads either, so he initially started posting his everyday advice as a kind of public service, never expecting for the hole to be as big as it was or for so many to feel that he was helping to fill it.
 
When Rob Kenny was having a bad week recently (and hadn’t posted his next vid when he’d planned and viewers were hoping), he got on the horn anyway, to “buy himself some time,” talking about how much he appreciated everyone’s comments on his last dollop of advice—“I’m new at being out in public like this” he explained, but your writing to me things like “Protect this man at all costs” helps me so much “because I need protection” so much–and then How Proud He Was of all the generous people who took the time to care about him back.
 
To him, it seemed to demonstrate their good character, even those like Joseph, who’d written (like he was some kind of tough guy): “This dude is making my eyes sweat.”
 
Rob Kenny’s “I am proud of you” post, which comes with an almost tearful dad-joke along with his struggles to get though Teddy Roosevelt’s “Daring Greatly” poem (from those halcyon days when our presidents were also poets) moves straight though the heart of maudlin with the sincerest of intentions.  
 
For me, It brought some tonic to another long week (when is the last time somebody said “I’m proud of you” just for making it through?), and it got me thinking about how much we all need not only hands-on guidance but also an attaboy now and then, even when it comes at the arms-length distance of a YouTube video or an article in the New Yorker, or a self-help book that you can spend all the time that you need with.  
 
Because the best of this kind of outreach conjures those extraordinary times when you were huddled knee-to-knee or hunched elbow-to-elbow over whatever it was, and somebody who cared enough was actually there with you showing you how.   
 
The life-blood in these kinds of tutorials comes from memories like that.

When I was in “start-up business mode” several years back and thinking about ways to change the world for the better, I had the idea for a school, or maybe just an area in every school, where you could learn about practical things that no one else seemed to be teaching.
 
There were places in my high school like wood shop and the typing pool where certain crafts and skills were taught.  Indeed, showing how close we were to the cusp at the time, BHS had already re-branded “home economics” as “cooking 1-2-3” so that boys wouldn’t feel too threatened to take it (and I could learn how to make pecan pie by the last class.) But there was no one there to teach me the soup-to-nuts of traveling by train or reading a roadmap, fixing a broken toaster or finding my way out of the woods if I got lost, traveling in a foreign country or changing a flat tire (although my fellow “industrial arts” students, who’d go on to become our town’s mechanics, might have helped with that last one if I’d asked). 
 
Perhaps because “practical” was not one of the first 10 or 15 words that anyone would have used to describe me, I was drawn to this gapping void in my own experience and maybe in the educational system generally. This un-met dimension of schooling would need to have guides who could show the uninitiated how to do all of those things that had somehow fallen through the cracks of our formal educations.  
 
I got far enough with this idea to wonder how I’d sell it to boards of education that (unfortunately) were already struggling to keep the school systems that they had already both functioning and safe. What was the “value-add” that parents and other civic-minded individuals would be willing to pay for in order to produce more fully-rounded graduates and a more capable community? That’s where the waves of my enthusiasm hit the shoals of feasibility. But I never abandoned the idea entirely.
 
At least intially, I returned to the need itself and where my urge to satisfy it had come from. I don’t recall wishing that my dad had taught me how to solve all of these lingering mysteries. Instead I came to realize that he’d actually given me some of the tools that I needed to solve them myself. As a businessman who was always on the road having “to figure things out,” he was a regular demonstration of how to turn conundrums into solutions. It was an internal discipline that I had in me too, however little I’d acted upon it. 
 
So if my “problem-solving” innovation was unlikely to fly in our school systems, maybe I had my own ability to find the practical, step-by-step paths that could lead me (rewardingly) to the bottom of whatever I was most curious about. It was a revelation that tracked my other dad-like substitute, the Cub Scout manual, in which every challenge (from making a fire in the woods to creating a successful lemonade stand) began with wondering how and ended after taking one practical step after another. 
 
In the ensuing years, I effectively brought that imagined part of schooling into my head, encouraging its problem-solving wherever curiosity took me, and thinking nothing more about it until I stumbled upon one of the most extraordinary things that I’ve ever read in New Yorker magazine.

_{This isn’t a picture of Kirk Varnedoe coaching the Giant Metrozoids, a well-named team of 8-year old boys learning the art and science of football twenty years ago. Indeed, it’s not even a picture of football players and their coach. But it might help you begin to imagine the accomplishments that a cohort like this can aim for together on a field of dreams.}

During the late 1990s, when Kirk Varnedoe was the curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he volunteered to help Luke, the son of New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and a clutch of other City boys eager to learn the game of football on a playing field in Central Park. Since Varnedoe and Gopnik already knew one another from their full-time pursuits, on an extracurricular voyage like this one it was like Odysseus finding his Homer. 
 
In the first 10 minutes, Gopnik realized that great teachers can “de-mystify” a painting as well as an athletic pursuit and that Varnedoe was world-class wherever he exercised his vocation. In fact, Varnedoe’s instincts as a field guide were so strong that he’d considered becoming a football coach after graduating from college, offering this post-mortem some years later on why he’d taken a more high-falutin direction.

if you’re going to spend your life coaching football, you have to be smart enough to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.

But of course, the underlying instincts don’t go away, they just get channeled into explaining, say, something as inscrutable as abstract expressionism to the un-convinced, which Varnedoe went on to do in the Mellon Lectures that he gave (to near unanimous acclaim) in the early 2000s at the National Gallery of Art. It was during this same span of years that also brought his de-mystifying abilities back to some 8-year old boys who wanted to explore the mysteries of football.
 
If your New Yorker subscription will get you over its paywall, you can read “The Last of the Metrozoids” here. You can also subscribe, “get a free tote,” and read it from “the inside” in the same place. Otherwise, you’ll have to trust in my ability to cull some of its best passages from my own torn-out copy of it and to include them here.
 
Gopnik sets the scene magnificently:

The boys came running from school, excited to have been wearing their Metrozoid T-shirts all day, waiting for practice. Eric and Derek and Ken, good athletes, determined and knowing and nodding brief, been-there-before nods as they chucked the ball around; Jacob and Charlie and Garrett, talking a little too quickly and uncertainly about how many downs you had and how many yards you had to go. Will and Luke and Matthew, very verbal, evangelizing for a game, please, can’t we, like, have a game with another team, right away, we’re ready; and Gabriel, just eager for a chance to get the ball and roll joyfully in the mud. I was curious to see what Kirk would do with them. ‘OK, he said, very gently…’Let’s break it down.’

After returning to basics they could easily swallow, Gopnik says: “They followed him like Israelites.”
 
What none of the boys knew however was how far back-to-basics they’d need to go before they actually picked up the ball and threw it around, or even learned which way to run. But Varnadoe understood that this game was less about what “you did” and more about what “you all did together.” So he continued by further bringing their enthusiasm to ground.

‘No celebrations,’ he said, arriving at the middle of the field. ‘This is a scrimmage. This is just the first step. We’re all one team. We are the Giant Metrozoids.’ He said the ridiculous name as though it were Fighting Irish…The kids stopped, subdued and puzzled. ‘Hands together,’ he said, and stretched his out, and solemnly the boys laid their hands on his, one after another. ‘One, Two, Three together!’ and all the hands sprang up. He had replaced a ritual of celebration with one of solidarity—and the boys sensed that solidarity was somehow at once more solemn and more fun than any passing victory could be.

Varnadoe also knew that what they were doing there was about more than the game. They’d all come (himself included) as one thing and by the end of their time together would leave as something else, because learning is always about transformation too, from one level of knowledge, appreciation or physicality to another. At this point, Gopnik disclosed the depth of Varnadoe’s own transformation, from a “fat and unimpressive” kid before he’d become a football player in college. About that earlier time Varnadoe said:

You were one kind of person with one kind of body and one set of possibilities, and then you worked at it and you were another. The model was so simple and so powerful that you could apply it to anything…It put your fate in your own hands.

So he endeavored to put the same kind of fate in each of the Metrozoid’s hands.
 
As the morning progressed, Varnadoe instilled the lesson by drilling the boys down into each step that they’d be taking on this field when they were ready. 

He had them do their first play at a walk, 6 times [Gopnik reported from the sidelines], which they clowned about, slow motion when they were inclined to be ‘terrier quick,’ but he still had them do it. Then they ‘ambled through it’ [making the proceedings take on]… a courtly quality, like a seventeenth century dance.

But the boys were beginning to see how the game was a series of basic steps that they could master, and that they needed to know how to do each step slowly before they could speed it up, and certainly before they could combine it with other steps. “You break it down and then you build it back up,” is how Varnedoe put it.
 
Some of his teaching also involved recognizing that every boy would come to his “de-mystification” differently—some emotionally, some through reasoning, and others more viscerally, through increasing their body awareness. So when circumstances called for it, he’d take, say a kid who seemed afraid of the football, to the side for some one-on-one instruction. But instead of focusing on the kid’s occasional successes and many failures, Gopnik described Varnadoe’s ability to engage the boy’s deeper drives.

When he caught [a ball], Kirk wasn’t too encouraging; when he dropped one he wasn’t too hard. He did not make him think it was easy.  He did not make him think that he had done it when he hadn’t. He made him think that he could do it if he chose.

Between the master and his chronicler, “The Last of the Metrozoids” blew me away when I first read it and still blows me away today because there is something almost supernatural about those who know how to build up the capabilities of others, are lucky enough to be captured in the act of doing so, and somewhere down the line, share those bits of magic with the rest of us.

This post was adapted from my March 20, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) 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.

_{(photo by Issac Quesade/Unsplash)}

Is having a child today—or a grandchild—an expression of fervent hope or an involuntary invitation that you’re handing down to someone who’s unable to refuse it?
 
It’s a fair question, relating to what are (perhaps) our first jobs:  as parents, as caregivers, as either believers or non-believers in the world to come.
 
Because every newborn is an embodiment of hope, our answers make us grapple with the future as we see it today.
 
These days, Tomorrowland is no longer the Jetsons flying cars from their open-to-the-sky houses with friendly robots inside, impossibly dressed as maids. Today, it seems closer to Cormac McCarthy’s survivalist The Road or last year’s best picture contender, the farcical Don’t Look Up–harsh and cruel on the one hand, shallow and in-denial on the other. 
 
I’d briefly thrown this question out to you before. That post was in the summer of 2017, years before a pandemic disrupted daily life, environmental collapse was something other than science fiction, or we had a 24/7 view of annihilation in a peace-loving country that often looked surprisingly like our own. 
 
Even if you keep shutting off the news for the sake of your sanity, the brain still completes its gloomy pictures. But then we’re reminded, there have been victories too: those nurses in the terrible breach, that rebound in the numbers of whales plying our oceans, those Ukrainians serenading their fleeing breathern with folk songs and accordions in train stations. Bleak with shafts of sunlight I’d call it, but as the tribulation (a biblical word) piles on, still bleaker than it seemed only five years ago when people were already asking:  “What if you decide to bring a child into this world? What do you owe her?” 
 
Before reaching for the bottle, perspective helps. This is neither the first nor will it be the last time that the future looks bleak. In 1891, almost 25 years before the catastrophe of World War I, Oscar Wilde did what great artists always do. He looked out and realized that something was tragically missing in a world that was already marching off to war amidst destructive new technologies and social upheavals, with callow leaders and millions of oblivious bystanders along for the ride. As far as Wilde could tell, no one seemed to be envisioning a better world any more, even though that’s the only world any sane person should want to be heading towards. As he said at the time:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always heading.

Isn’t utopia the future that we want for our children?  Not some nostalgic past that never really existed but a sustainable place with wiser leaders, where humanity is enhanced by its technologies instead of subjugated by them, where we flourish by celebrating our common humanity instead of preying on one another.  But none of us will ever reach such of place unless we can imagine it first.
 
One of my favorite writers is Michael Chabon (check out his marvelous Moonglow if you’ve somehow missed it) and I happened upon an essay of his this week where he (like Wilde before him) looked around, shortly after the turn of a different century, and noticed that something was terribly missing. His queries around “what that was exactly” were prompted by his discovery of an audaciously hopeful scheme that had been launched some time before. It was called the Clock of the Long Now. A tee-up to Chabon’s essay on Longreads described the powerful response that a few visionaries had made to “a disappearing future”:

One of the grandest gestures toward imagining the future is the Clock of the Long Now. Originally conceived by inventor, computer scientist, and Disney Imagineering fellow Danny Hillis, and expected to cost in the tens of millions of dollars, the clock is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Besides being a tremendous feat of engineering, it’s also a tremendous statement of faith — building it is a bet that there will be humans around over the next 10 millennia to hear its bells ring.

To Chabon, the Clock of the Long Now seemed a utopian commitment, not to a destination on a map but to something that feels just as bold today: that we, our children and our children’s children actually have “a Long Now” stretching before us.
 
As Chabon quickly understood, the point of this invention was not to measure our passage of time into an unknown future or to celebrate the strange race of creatures that built it. No, it had little to do with our time-keeping or technical wizzardry. “The point of the Clock,” he writes, “is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future.”

‘The Future,’ whether you capitalize it or not, is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. ‘The Future’ is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread or wonder. And it’s a story that, for a while now, we’ve been pretty much living without….

Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of the world beyond the present presidential administration?

No, we probably can’t—or think we can’t. But the Clock of the Long Now wants to recover that loss, quite literally, as an emblem of belief in horizons that extend beyond the screens that we’re holding in our hands and their always-in-the-present diversions.
 
Chabon laments that Americans (as a culture and a country) are no longer caught between the poles of “the bright promise and the bleak menace.” Now (and he wrote this 15 years ago) we seem to have mostly the latter and little of the former. I think it’s one reason why we’ve been so gobsmacked by the nobility of Ukraine’s resistance in the face of barbarism—all of these people (where did they come from?) so full of “the promise” in spite of “the menace.” 
 
Asking similar questions, he ends up thinking about his young son, with a tremendous sadness, given how different Chabon’s own speculations about The Future had been when he was that age: 

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.

So in response, Chabon tells his son about the Clock of the Long Now, and while he did so his son “listened very carefully” before asking, “Will there really be people then, Dad,” ten thousand years from now? “’Yes,’ I told him without hesitation, ‘there will,” [although, to himself] I don’t know if that’s true.” Chabon confirmed this Truth to his boy because he felt that he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. “[I]n having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now.”
 
Just think about that for a minute. What you believe, what you hope, and how you’d answer that child, who embodies “a far longer now” than you do, when she begins to wonder about what lies ahead.

Doomsday scenarios around climate catastrophe have lent a powerful sense of urgency to questions around giving birth or refusing to do so. If what’s ahead are more devastating floods, wildfires, famines, mass migrations, ferocious competitions over scarce resources, and increasing strife among nations, it sometimes appears that all we have to look forward to is an even more Hobbsian world of tooth and claw–and no place for children.
 
In my own travels through this quandary, I couldn’t help but notice that there are hundreds of articles out there trying to find the “fairness” to future children in our having them today, with most concluding that we should forego childbearing altogether. In particular, these debates have been catnip for philosophers, with one in The New Republic (“Is It Cruel To Have Kids In the Era of Climate Change”) beginning his take on it this way:

In one of his early works, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche relayed an Ancient Greek legend about King Midas pursuing the satyr Silenus, a wise companion of the god Dionysus. When Midas finally captures Silenus, he asks him what ‘the best thing of all for men’ is. ‘The very best thing for you is totally unreachable,’ Silenus replies: ‘not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing.’

If that were in fact true it would simplify matters enormously, not only for those of us who are here now but for all the rest who might be coming. But is it really this black and white?
 
In a different essay, another philosopher (who specializes in the “ethics and metaphysical issues regarding birth, death and meaning”) invites us to weigh the plausible (as opposed to existential) risks that are facing both us and that future child. 
 
Against “the near-certain” threat of a “global warming apocalypse” today, she recalls the failed predictions of Thomas Malthus in 1798 that a human population boom would outstrip the world’s food supply (“Imagine if everyone decided to stop having children back then to avoid the ‘inevitable’ famine?), and somewhat more humorously, The London Times’ prediction in 1890 that by 1940 there would be so much manure piling up after the horse drawn carriages that “every street in London would be buried in nine feet of manure.” (“Imagine if people had decided it was wrong to create a child to wade through the muck?”).  As a result, her analysis concludes more equivocally than Silenus’s. Her “tipping point” for the question ‘Is life a worthwhile risk?” is whether or not you happen to believe the climate-related forecasts.
 
And I suppose to some extent that’s true.  But it leaves us (unhelpfully) in the middle of the climate believer/denier debates, when I think what we need is a sign post that will get us to a more enabling place, to help us decide the matter “in our hearts” (if you will), that brings us to a stand that’s more embedded in human nature than in risk analysis as we consider whether “bringing a child into a world like this” is justifiable.
 
Which brings us back to Nietzche.  Because, as the New Republic essayist eventually tells us, the great German philosopher didn’t agree with the answer that the satyr Silenus gave to King Midas. In Nietzche’s worldview, you should never wish that you hadn’t been born, nor should you refuse to bring children into the world because of the miserable state in which you currently find it. 
 
To some extent, this is because living has always involved both tragedy and triumph. Only today, amidst the cosseting and complacency of a society as rich as ours do we seem to have forgotten this basic tension in our existence. (Before Nietzche and long before Amazon and the Metaverse believing people called these deeply human realities “sin” and “grace.”)
 
So the Nietzche readers among you will also recall his “Will to Life,” his “triumphant Yes” to the question of human existence, his “affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest of problems.” To be human is always to struggle to find ways to affirm the force of our lives in the full knowledge that death is also roaming among us.  
 
That’s maturity. That’s what every parent who should be a parent understands. 
 
As they make it “their own work” to fight against what’s unfair and unacceptable, these parents teach their children by their examples, standing right there alongside of them as their kids learn how to do the same thing. 
 
These parents believe in The Future, which is why they answer “Yes” (without hesitating) when they’re asked, “Will there be a future ten thousand years from now?” even though we can never be sure. That hope is always tentative, contingent, and we’re big enough to handle its uncertainties.
 
All that good parents can be sure of is that they’ll be standing next to that child while he or she begins to claim his or her part of it, that no child in this family will ever have to face The Future alone. Likewise, it’s a standing-on-shoulders legacy that can continue as long as the young and their nurturers are giving a “triumphant Yes” to whatever tomorrow holds in the overlapping work of their lives.
 
Yes!, even when our streets are clogged with nine feet of sh*t and the warm sun of springtime has just come out.

This post was adapted from my April 24, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any of them by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

It’s harder than ever to maintain, and then safeguard, our zones of privacy.
 
I’ve been thinking about it in terms of pictures that other people take of us or that we take of them—sometimes when those other people are friends, sometimes when they’re strangers, and sometimes when its companies or authorities who are taking them for their own purposes.
 
In these photographs, what is the line between a fair exchange (with mutual benefits) and an unwelcomed intrusion?
 
What exactly are we “taking” when we take a picture of somebody?
 
(When shown their photographs, tribal people often complain that the camera has somehow stolen their souls.)
 
Is there, or should there be, a “give” as well as a “take” with photography?
 
Two encounters this week sharpened that last question for me.
 
A close colleague of mine in counseling work stopped by unannounced with some cookies to end our just concluded school year on a celebratory note. We’d been meeting with our kids on Zoom and hadn’t seen one another in person for months. She was so glad to see me that she wanted to take my picture before leaving, but I waved her gesture off. I’d stopped mowing the lawn when I saw her heading my way and felt that my sweaty appearance would have made a poor souvenir (even though she clearly felt otherwise). “What just happened?” I wondered afterwards.
 
My second encounter came by way of reminiscence.
 
Three years ago this week, I had been in New Orleans and was remembering that unbelievably rich and flavorful time, eager to go back and dig in even deeper. Part of my return trip would be taking in a “second line” street parade, because every week of the year at least one of them takes place somewhere in the City.

As you can imagine, these parades (which are sponsored by New Orlean’s “social aid and pleasure clubs”) are a kind of paradise for professional and amateur photographers.  While following a random NOLA thread last week, I came across a story about “the etiquette of making photos” of the performers at these parades. This story also speculated about the “taking and giving” boundaries of photographing other people. For example:
 
Are there different rules for friends than there are for strangers?
 
Several years ago, Susan Sontag explored these boundaries and expectations in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books, later published in her own book, On Photography. Sontag focused on the “acquisitive” nature of cameras, how they “take something” from whoever or whatever is being photographed, a sentiment that’s similar to those tribal member fears about having their essences stolen. She wrote:

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Sontag also commented on the vicarious nature of picture taking. 

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, [or at least] for giving the appearance of participation.

The way she saw it, we may not be marching in (or even watching) the parade, “but somehow we feel that we are” if we can capture a picture of it for savoring now and later on. Instead of “being in the moment,” we’re counting on the triggering nature of these pictures to approximate the real experience we’ve missed by “capturing enough of it” to still feel satisfied. 
 
Of course, there are consequences on both sides to this kind of “taking.” A drive to accumulate photographic experiences can not only rob us of more direct engagement with other people and places (say, the actual smells and sounds of the parade, or the conversations we might otherwise be having with spectators and participants), it also raises questions about the boundaries that can be crossed when we’re driven by a kind of hunger to “take” more and more of them without ever realizing the impacts that we’re having by doing so. To our camera’s subjects, it can feel like violation.
 
As I’ve become more thoughtful about these impacts, it’s meant thinking through my picture-taking drive in advance.
 
What is gained and what can be lost when I’m taking somebody’s picture? What is (or should be) the etiquette around photographing others? These are questions that seem impossible to ignore since cameras are literally everywhere today, devouring what they see through their lenses.  As a result, going through some Q&A with myself by way of preparation—whether I’m likely to be the photographer or the photographed—increasingly seems like a good idea. 
 
For instance, what if strangers “who would make me a great picture” are performing in public or, even more commonly, just being themselves in a public place when I happen upon them with my camera? 
 
My most indelible experience of the latter happened at the Damascus Gate, which leads to the “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City. In arcs along the honey-colored steps that sweep down to that massive archway, Palestinian women, many in traditional clothes, were gathering and talking in a highly animated fashion against the backdrop of ancient battlements, but as soon as I pointed my camera in their direction to take “my perfect shot,” they raised their hands, almost as one, and shielded their faces from me. Was that ever sobering! I didn’t know whether they were protecting their souls or simply their modesty and privacy from another invasive tourist.
 
In the story about picture taking at parades in New Orleans, one photographer who is drawn by their similarly incredible visuals observed:

You really have to be present and aware and know when the right time is to take a photo. Photography can be an extractive thing, exploitative, especially now when so many people have cameras. 

To her, knowing when to shoot and when to refrain from picture taking is about reading the situation, 

a vibe. You know when somebody wants you to take their photo, and you know when somebody doesn’t.

Another regular parade photographer elaborated on her comments:

If you carry yourself the right way . . . people putting on that parade see you know how to handle yourself and will give you a beautiful shot.

I’ve also found that performers want you to portray them in the best light and will help you “to light the scene” when you make eye contact and invite them to do so. On the other hand, they will also tell you (if you’re paying attention) when the lighting is off and you should just back off.

Because everybody wants to look their best while being photographed, the same rules usually apply when the subjects aren’t part of a performance but simply out in public, being interesting by being themselves. For the would-be photographer, it’s about initiating a conversation and establishing at least a brief connection before asking: can I take your picture? If they don’t feel “looked down upon” by your interest, they’ll often agree. But as with those “on stage,” these preliminaries can also result in: “No, I’d rather that you didn’t right now,” a phrase that’s hard to hear when “a great picture” is right there in front of you if only you could “take it.”
 
Whenever you know in advance that taking pictures could be uncomfortable for those being photographed, one New Orleans parade regular talked about the need to deepen his relationship with those he wants to photograph before showing up with his camera. Because he takes pictures at NOLA’s legendary funeral parades, he brings club members photos that he’s taken of the deceased on prior occasions so that colleagues and family “have a record of that person’s street style.” It’s his sign of respect at what is, after all, a time for grieving a loss as well as celebrating a life.

We go and we shoot funerals and [then] it’s not a voyeuristic thing. You’re doing what you do within the context of the community

—a community that you’ve already made yourself at least “an honorary member of” through your empathy and generosity. 
 
Then, what you’re giving tends to balance what you’ll be taking.

So what about my cookie-bearing friend who showed up unannounced this week? 
 
Should I have relaxed “my best foot forward” enough to permit one sweaty shot when she so clearly wanted a memento of our reunion after so many months apart?  
 
Yes, probably. 
 
But I’ve become so defensive about cameras taking my picture on every city street, whenever I ring somebody’s doorbell or face my laptop screen that sometimes it’s hard to recognize when “putting down my guard” is actually relationship building and for my own good instead of some kind of robbery.
 
Where zones of personal privacy are concerned, this is a tricky time to navigate either taking pictures of somebody or being captured by one.
 
It’s one more reason to try and rehearse my camera-related transactions before I find myself, once again, in the middle of one. 
 

+ + + 

 
(If you’re interested in a photo essay I posted after my last visit to New Orleans, here it is, from May, 2018. Another post, with photos taken at the Mummers Parade in January, 2019, can be found here. Taking pictures has always been a way that I recharge for work, although I’m still in the process of learning its complicated rules.)

This post was adapted from my May 30, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

As a kid, I was a digger. Always outside in the meadow that ran the back of my house, in the woods that huddled behind the half-circle of homes down the hill, or even in the less visited recesses of my yard, I was always looking for something “down there.” But I never found anything like the spines of the Anglo-Saxon long ship that were unearthed in the picture above.
 
In a post from December called Digging for a Sense of Place, I described how I didn’t really find anything you’d call “archeological” until I got to Philadelphia and came upon what might have been an 18^th century kitchen dump beneath our magnolia tree out back. (My home is a block and a half from an historical marker that tells of British troops camping here before the Battle of Germantown, so I suppose the pottery shards I found there could also have been left behind when these very soldiers moved to their next encampment.) Anyway, while thinking about my relationship to the places where I’ve lived, I also saw some of the roots of my commitment to and indifference about the ravages of climate change—and how I might get that wavering to settle down into something more like steady resolve.

Because our plots of land are relative strangers to us, we don’t embrace them with the same protective bonds that draw us, to say, a child under threat. Instead, they are… little more than addresses, places to arrive at or depart from but not necessarily learn more about, even while we’re spending most of our time there.

Maybe because I’d written this post so recently, I couldn’t believe the coincidence when a British filmmaker presented his movie, called The Dig, on Netflix this week. Told with unsettling beauty, it’s a story about the quixotic excavation of an ancient burial mound on a manor estate in southeast England. With remarkable restraint, it uses its Dark Age discoveries to throw the early bombing raids over Britain during World War II (whenThe Dig takes place) into bold relief.  
 
These bombers, like heavy, lumbering cows, crisscross the skies above the excavation site, falling down to earth on one occasion while simultaneously calling more young Englishmen up into the clouds to risk their lives. Much like them, we also need the memories of our place in the world to anchor an uncertain future. With new viral strains announced almost daily and the need to inoculate an entire planet before “normal” or “safe” can return, it still remains unnervingly unclear how any of us will come out the other end.  As with the pilots and diggers of rural England in the 1940s, it might get us thinking about what we’d most like to carry with us–what we’d most like to preserve–as we too face the unknown.
 
This trailer for The Dig will give you the flavor of its juxtapositions on time, place, loss as well as the kind of gain that becomes possible when you seize the day.

Among many other things, this is an actors’ movie, particularly for Mulligan, Barnes and Fiennes. 
 
Mulligan’s Edith Pretty is weighed down by the emotional and physical ailments that have increasingly burdened her since her husband, a soldier himself, died shortly after they married and their son was born. It is her estate that houses the ancient burial mounds, she’s always wondered what secrets they might hold, and perhaps because of her own dwindling, she finally resolves to find out. Mulligan’s startling performance pushes Edith to the boundaries of her fragile condition and to small bursts of vitality beyond it. 
 
Edith finds the complement she needs “for a dig” in Basil Brown, “a self-taught excavator” who knows “everything there is to know” about the ground and soil of Suffolk since, as he takes pains to explain, his hands have been combing through it for over sixty years. A hard-working man, he learns how to find common ground with Edith across the gapping class divides of rural England in a dance of blunt and sometimes comical exchanges. Basil Brown is played by Ralph Fiennes, who has inhabited everyone from Voldermort to Jonathan Steed (the TV Avengers protagonist) and the English Patient in his years playing leading men on the big-screen. Given those marquee roles, his understated Basil is a departure.
 
When interviewed about it, Fiennes (himself a Suffolk native) said he spent weeks riding an old bike along the country roads of southeast England to refresh his feelings for the place and its rhythms before filming began. In other interviews The Dig’s creative force, Simon Stone, said he encouraged his actors to ad-lib the script when it felt right to them. For the character of Basil in particular, deep knowledge of the land and the freedom to be spontaneous produce a kind of honest power that is evident throughout this performance, which is the best of his that I’ve seen in his long career.
 
The eight (or so)-year-old actor Archie Brown plays Edith’s son Robert. A dazzling counterpoint to the mumbling Basil and his frail mother, Robert brings the fireworks of childish excitement and gushing enthusiasm to this dig for buried treasure. In their small community quest, he also discovers a father figure, awakening in Basil the best kind of paternalism when the old codger least expects it. A sequence where Robert takes off from home on his bike in search of Basil is gorgeously realized and almost unbearably sad in its desperate longing. But while the buried treasures here are frequently emotional, there are also splendid discoveries to be made as this ragtag band carves its way beneath the ground.
 
What The Dig’s spirited amateurs discover became known as the Sutton Hoo Treasure, stored in the buried hull of a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon ship to honor a Dark Age king. As a long-time believer in buried treasure, if I have a complaint about this movie it’s that we get to see too little of this magnificent horde—mostly as it temporarily rests on the mossy beds of wooden crates that are placed, one after another, under Edith’s bed, near a suitcase that had been her husband’s. 
 
She ultimately gives the Sutton Hoo Treasure to the British Museum despite sniveling among the “professional” archeologists and museum curators that provide the film’s suspense (“What will become of this magical discovery at a time when we all need to feel the joy of it?”) Representing an almost entirely unknown chapter of the nation’s memory, there is never really any doubt where it’s headed. The Sutton Hoo Treasure will go to the place where the greatest number of Edith’s and Basil’s countrymen and women can gather around its campfire and face whatever tomorrow holds together.

Well into The Dig, Basil’s bedrock of a wife wonders at his conviction and tenacity, over “just how he is,” not really asking as much as telling him: “Why else would you be playing around in the dirt while the rest of the country prepares for war?” 
 
So it’s fitting that his and Edith’s quiet obsessions play out not in a “post-card pretty England” but in more of a dreamscape of grays and ochers during the day or in a nightmare when it’s dark and raining and Basil is trying to pull reluctant tarps over the excavation site despite being blinded by the spattering mud. What’s at stake here is not the rose-colored surfaces of England’s countryside but what supports that splendor underneath: its long buried past and the quiet furnaces that animate the men and women who have lived for centuries “closest to its ground.”
 
In an echo of the Anglo-Saxon ship that’s being unearthed, my favorite scene in the movie is of a contemporary sailboat drifting along the same nearby river that carried the burial chamber of an ancient king to what might have been his final resting place 1500 years before. It was like a message-in-a-bottle or maybe a promise of things to come. Like Basil for a moment, I could almost hear the past reverberating into the present and maybe even the future. 
 
When you see The Dig, you’ll know what I mean about “how Basil is,” the silent quest that drives Edith, and how valuable spirit voices like theirs might be in each of us too as we worry and wonder about what’s worth preserving in our fragile world today so we can take it into the future.

This post was adapted from my February 7, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

On a train to New York City, I found myself sitting next to a doctor from Johns Hopkins. Mid-career. Confident. As it turned out, he was also from a family of doctors. 

In his career, he said he’d alternated between research and seeing patients and I asked him if he was getting what he’d hoped out of it. He said he had at the beginning, when he could practice more the way his dad had, like taking the time he needed to treat his patients. But more recently, demands from the government and insurance providers were requiring him to spend more and more patient time gathering information and creating medical records about their visits.

It gave him “an awful choice,” he said. “I can either spend much of my patient time looking down at my pad or tablet and taking notes or I can look them in the eye. I went into medicine to establish healing relationships, it’s how I saw my dad practice, but now this beast has to be fed every day.”

“What beast,” I asked. “Because I’ve chosen to keep talking to my patients,” he responded, “I still have to record all their medical information before I forget what we talked about, so almost every night I spend between 9 p.m. and midnight ‘feeding the data beast’  because, of course, my wife and kids get to see me for an hour or so once I get home.”  “The volume of it is grinding me down,” he continued, “but our insurance system requires it. What I looked forward to as a doctor every day is getting harder to come by.”

I’ve noticed this from the other side too. When I go to a specialist or for my regular check-ups I’m faced by my doctor as well as “a record keeper” with a touch screen. I’m always asked whether “I mind” having record keepers there and can always ask them to leave if I want to talk “one-on-one,” but it changes the entire dynamic in the room. Is this visit about me or my medical information?

It’s not whether electronic record keeping is working as intended, or is actually helping to manage medical costs that caught my eye this week. Instead, it’s how the generation and use of patient data is placing more obligations (with fairly profound ethical implications) on the so-called healing arts, and how far those obligations extend beyond data privacy and confidentiality.  Among other things, it got me wondering whether even our best doctors and medical caregivers are treating us as collections of data points instead of “as whole patients” in the grind of it all.  

For centuries, a doctor’s ethical obligations have been set forth in the Hippocratic Oath, with its standards being tailored to current understandings about health and healing.  For example, to reflect our growing environmental awareness, a current version of the Oath widens the focus of care from the individual patient to the health of the community and the planet itself:

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
 
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
 
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
 
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.
 
I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.
 
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
 
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. 
 
My responsibility [also] includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick:
 
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
 
I will protect the environment which sustains us, in the knowledge that the continuing health of ourselves and our societies is dependent on a healthy planet.
 
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those [who are] sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
 
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

In the light of today’s Hippocratic Oath, it was easy to find several of its shadows.

Can our doctors provide “warmth, sympathy and understanding” while they are also filling in the blanks in their paperwork during the few minutes they are allotted to spend with us?  
 
When it comes to my data, how is it being used, who is using it, and how exactly is “my privacy” being protected?
 
Is this data collection primarily designed to make “the business of medicine’” more cost effective and efficient, or does it also promote my health and healing?  
 
What is my responsibility as a patient, not only as a collaborator in my medical outcomes but also regarding  “the multiple lives” of the data I’m providing?
 
In these regards, some food for thought this week came in the form of a new Hippocratic Oath that has been proposed by West Coast doctor Jordan Shlain. I think you’ll agree that in some ways his proposed Oath makes our jobs as patients and our doctors’ (and other medical professionals’) jobs as healers even more fraught than they were already. 
 
Here’s Dr. Shlain’s proposed Oath, with my initial impressions [in brackets] following each of its statements.
 
1. I shall endeavor to understand what matters to the patient and actively engage them in shared decision making. I do not ‘own’ the patient nor their data. I am a trusted custodian.
         
[Instead of doctors doing and patients receiving, the emphasis on joint decision-making shares the health and healing burden more equitably. Unanswered is whether patients should own their medical data.]
 
2. I shall focus on good patient care and experience to make my profits. If I can’t do well by doing good and prove it, I don’t belong in the field of the healing arts.
 
3. I shall be transparent and interoperable. I shall allow my outcomes to be peer-reviewed.
 
[Both 2 and 3 confront “the business of medicine” squarely in the Oath, acknowledging that care should be delivered with greater transparency around a doctor’s outcomes for patients, which the data now allows. As the business of medicine publically proves its worth, patients will become more like shoppers in a marketplace. What this new reality means in terms of accessibility or quality of care is, of course, uncertain.]
 
4. I shall enable my patients the opportunity to opt in and opt out of all data sharing with non-essential medical providers at every instance.
 
[Recognizing a patient’s interest in his/her data, information will need to be disclosed about essential and non-essential users of that data and about each patient’s ability to limit how it is shared.]
 
5. I shall endeavor to change the language I use to make healthcare more understandable; less Latin, less paternal language; I shall cease using acronyms. 
 
6. I shall make all decisions as though the patient was in the room with me and I had to justify my decision to them.
 
7. I shall make technology, including artificial intelligence algorithms that assist clinicians in medical decision-making, peer-reviewable.
 
[As AI and augmented intelligence programs become more common in medicine, protecting proprietary business information should not inhibit validation of the tools a doctor is using to treat us by his or her professional peers.]
 
8. I believe that health is affected by social determinants. I shall incorporate them into my strategy.
 
[This one goes further into the community behind the patient. As Dr. Shlain argues: “Someone’s zip code can tell you more about their health than their genetic code.”]
 
9. I shall deputize everyone in my organization to surface any violations of this oath without penalty. I shall use open-source artificial intelligence as the transparency tool to monitor this oath.
 
[With doctors working until midnight to feed the data beast and stressed about market competition from other practice groups, their willingness to open themselves to these kinds of ethical challenges from within their organizations seems almost utopian, but at the same time, this part of the proposed Oath acknowledges that patient/consumers alone won’t be able to police this rapidly evolving profession.]  
  
Increasing reliance on data collection and algorithm-driven automation is changing the medical profession into a business. It also changes our jobs as patients, Where once we were passive recipients of “the healing arts,” we are now being called upon to become more engaged consumers, with rights to more information about our care and additional options in the marketplace. Moreover, we should be as concerned about the uses of our medical information as we are about how our other personal data is being used (or misused) by Google, Facebook or governmental bodies like the police and IRS. 
 
At the same time that doctors should be anticipating more changes to the Hippocratic Oath, the job of being a patient and the responsibilities that come with it are also becoming more burdensome. It’s not doctor “up here” (with all the responsibility) and patient “down there” (with almost none of it) any more. We’re confronting an uncertain future together now.

This post was adapted from my November 10, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.