A Time for Repair, for Wintering

December 13, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I live on a ridge that shoots in from the City boundaries in the northwest and descends, first gradually and then by leaps and bounds, as it reaches towards sea level in the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers.

At our point in this descent, a downward-sloping wind tunnel has been created so that the “weather” coming in from Canada and the Mid-West barrels through it, two or more times each year, snapping trees in its wake like match sticks.

In recent years, two of our trees have borne the brunt. A much-loved magnolia was simply uprooted in one barrage and, a winter or so later, the maple that had been its closest companion was essentially sheered in half.

Since what remained of the maple was pretty ungainly, I could have had it removed but then the most treasured trees on this plot of land—a huge American chestnut, a 200-year-old tulip poplar, and a previously-admired gingko—would have been totally exposed to the gale-force winds.

To begin to rectify the situation, I planted a hardy young silver linden near the spot where the magnolia had fallen, but it will be years before it provides much of a windbreak. So I’m also counting on the half-maple to do what it can, and I’ve been watching it closely–for several months now—as it works to repair and rebalance itself. Among other things, I’ve been surprised at how its “wounds” have closed, where it has decided to sprout new growth, and how it’s been “filling itself back in” from the half arm and lopsided “Y’ of a trunk that remained.

Despite a hard couple of years, there’s been something assessing and almost deliberate about its healing– like a self-powered erector set of verticals, horizontals and angles reaching again for the sky.

My maple-watching preoccupation probably explains my eagerness to read “Trees Don’t Rush to Heal from Trauma and Neither Should We” when this explainer of an article popped into my Short List on Twitter this week.

I wasn’t drawn to the take-aways that trees might be sharing with us (because I’m fairly certain that they don’t think about us enough to offer us much advice), but because of the title’s suggestion that trees decide not to rush when they’re recovering from calamity, that they take their time because they need to get it right. I wanted to know more about that particular drive.

The author, it said, was a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, more specifically of microbiology and molecular plant genetics, which made the piece even more promising. I was even undaunted when I learned that she’d written a book that someone at her publisher had decided to call Lessons From Plants, as if readers needed to be told about “what’s in it for them” in order to pick up this book. I would have gone with The Amazing Ways That Trees Survive and Even Heal From Trauma as a title—less anthropomorphic and more to the point—but anyway, the author’s name is Beronda Montgomery and she managed to pack several interesting insights into her fairly short piece.

Montgomery began by noting how the period of late fall and into winter may be the best time of year to observe the ways that our trees are resting up and recovering before launching a new season of growth in the spring. Particularly in deciduous trees—like our maple—“the carefully orchestrated process of leaf senescence begins [and] the hidden structures of trees emerge” during the late-fall and winter months. She continued:

During the autumnal senescence, the tree suspends active growth and recovers the nutrients of its leaves. This process occurs first by degrading the green chlorophylls that drive photosynthesis – the means by which plants harness light energy – and then converting complex compounds into soluble sugars and amino acids, which are banked over winter for use by the tree in the following spring. Once the nutrients are resorbed [I never heard that word before either, but it says exactly what it means], the tree begins to drop its leaves.

Once a tree loses its leaves (and the leaves of nearby trees are no longer cloaking it in shadow), tree-observers can also see how a tree has been faring in previous months from the abundance (or lack) of winter buds that have appeared, the proliferation of new branches, and whether the wounds that the tree trunks have suffered seem to be healing.

Montgomery says that the wound healing process, in particular, happens in two stages: “an initial, rapid chemical phase, followed by a slower, long-term physical adaptation.” In the first stage, trees produce phytochemicals with antimicrobial/antifungal properties that prevent disease from entering trees through open wounds, leading to eventual decay. After these defenses are mounted, trees begin to produce a soft tissue “callus” that hardens gradually over time. This several-month process keeps the wound free from infection while promoting oxygenation before it produces long-term, protective scar tissue.

It’s the slowness of the second-half of this healing process–all the time that the tree needs–that is most noteworthy to Montgomery:

Covering a wound prematurely simply to keep the damage out of sight, without attention to openly dealing with it through cleansing and therapeutic care, can lead to a festering of issues rather than a healthy progression towards healing, reformulation, growth and thriving.

That progression includes the slow restoration “of sugar-transporting phloem tissues and water-passing xylem structures” that allow a tree to continue to pursue its core purpose of photosynthesis while it accommodates environmental factors like the availability of sunlight, neighboring trees that are competing or cooperating with it, the available nutrients in the soil, and the other threats (like insect pests) that it faces.

You might call this progression “healing fast and slow,” the opposite of a band-aid over an injury before quickly moving on. In Montgomery’s “wound-healing paradigm,” while infection threats have to be countered quickly, repair needs to happen through cleansing flows of oxygen over extended periods of time, the very slow hardening of initially porous scar tissue, and the even slower re-building of core infrastructure.

Yes, it’s the horizontal, vertical and angling branches I could see in September but it’s also the slowly revitalizing engines of the tree trunks that are far more visible to the roving eye in the months of December, January and February.

There is a necessary time for repair, and in a tree it is measured slowly or the repairs won’t succeed at all.

Unlike plants teaching us lessons, perhaps the seasons and how we can learn adapt to them actually do.

On the backcover of Katherine May’s 2020 book, which is called Wintering, she conjures not the season but a kind of “respite” and “recuperative states of mind” that the season of winter teaches us something about.

For her, “to winter” is to learn how to flourish in lean times, when we not longer have the spring’s freshness, the summer’s warmth or the autumn’s harvest to fall back on—when we’ve been stripped down to the basics and must re-charge our flickering batteries. May writes:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting…

On the other hand, enabling healing and repair in ourselves can be easier said than done. Unlike a wounded maple tree that “knows” what to do “first” and then “more slowly and continuously” over time, we often seem to lack the evolutionary roadmap that can enable us to confront, repair and recover—that is, to make something that’s harder, stronger and more resilient than we had before in the “crucible” that May identifies.

For her, wisdom about wintering didn’t come because she chose to encounter it one day. “However it arrives,” May writes, “wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.” In her own life, she needed to learn how to cope and then recover after waves of disruption roiled the core of her existence. (Her husband fell ill and nearly died. Her own health declined to the point that she could no longer work. Her 6-year old son became too anxious to go to school. Many of the things that May had counted on as a partner, as a professional and as a mother now felt “provisional and unsettled.”) In her “fallow season,” May had to learn to admit the extent of her disorientation and unhappiness, and that validating these feelings neither encouraged them nor made them worse. Instead, by making a place for her desolation she began to learn how “to winter” through it, something that the natural world already knows instinctively.

May’s notion of “wintering through”—which she never tires of visualizing with the range of her poet’s eye—is what’s most remarkable about her book. The grounding metaphor not only separates a time of injury, respite and repair from healthier and happier times—a liminal season that’s entirely apart from the fatter ones that came before—but also activates the transformational qualities of inhabiting (and even mastering) the challenges of a place that’s as hard as this, at least when we refuse to deny its harsh realities by blaming ourselves for its challenges or attempting to sedate them away.

We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.

For this very wise person, wintering is a state where all of us will find ourselves eventually, and more than that, where all of us need to find ourselves from time to time in order to discover the native resourcefulness that we have to repair ourselves, to recover our footing and to evolve.

Wintering may be something we need to give ourselves now, when the ground outside is hard and the trees bare, or at some other time of the calendar year, but it can be confronted with greater hope given the familiarity and color that’s imparted in Katherine May’s deeply compassionate book.

Here is a link if you’re interested in a thoroughly enjoyable, hour-long conversation with May about the thoughts and experiences behind Wintering. And if you find yourself hooked, you can also listen regularly to her “Wintering Sessions” podcast. I think that you’ll find her voice to be a consolation worth marshaling for this time and for any difficult time ahead.

This post was adapted from my February 6, 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.

Last weekend, on December 11, 2022, my weekly post revisited this discussion about “wintering” and added to it. If you’re interested, it’s called: “A Calendar with 52 Seasons.”

A Swaggering Story That Speaks to Our Time

October 22, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There are three extraordinary aspects to the storytelling in Marshall, a new movie appearing in theaters this week.

Its protagonist, Thurgood Marshall, was the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Several years before he took the bench, Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a high court case that found state laws establishing separate schools for black and white children to be unconstitutional. But long before his career peak or landmark victory, Marshall was a young NAACP lawyer struggling to represent a black defendant who was charged with raping a white woman.

That courtroom is where most of this movie takes place, and it’s the first story element that struck me. Marshall was virtually unknown back then. He seems to think he’s “all that,” but unlike the swaggering hotshot that we’re meeting for the first time, we know something that he doesn’t, namely, all that he’ll go on to accomplish. This absence of knowledge means that it could be anybody’s bright future that glitters in his eyes.

The second arresting feature is Marshall’s complicated, flawed personality.

We meet a whip-smart prankster who can be charming but also full of guile. In action, his bravado makes him the life of the party one minute and an arrogant jerk the next.

Before the Connecticut case, we see Marshall enjoying the high life of jazz era Harlem. But he also decides to leave his beautiful wife and celebrity friends behind to fight for civil rights in some of the most hostile corners of America. To leave these comforts for a life of combativeness and fear is either the definition of foolhardy or tremendously courageous.

It is the ambivalence of these details that enable us to share in his story. Brazen but also exposed, this Marshall is never too good to be true. It may have been the bright future in this man’s eyes and his relatable personality that caused Chicago’s Chance the Rapper to buy out two theater seatings of the movie—his announcement appears below—so that kids from his old neighborhood could encounter a role model who feels like the real thing.

What really got my attention though was the third turn that the story takes.

As the trial unfolds, Marshall confronts the fact that he is an out-of-state lawyer who cannot speak for himself or his client in this courtroom. Because he was not admitted to practice in Connecticut, Marshall literally has to “speak through his local counsel,” a young insurance attorney unversed in either criminal law or racial animosity. In other words, without his rhetorical skills and righteous passion, what everyone knows is Marshall’s best hand has been tied behind his back and that he has to learn to fight without it.

Chadwick Boseman, the actor who plays Marshall, described this element of the story in an interview when the movie was released:

Jeffrey Brown: You wanted to make your big courtroom speech?

Chadwick Boseman: Had to, you know. But the more I read it, I realized that this was the exact obstacle that would make the movie interesting. The truth of the matter is, when you’re acting [in the courtroom scenes] you’re silent. Your non-verbals are dialogue, subtext. And that’s actually just as hard, if not harder, than having the huge speech at the end….

Of course it is. A lot harder.

The young Thurgood Marshall was a black lawyer in a hostile community that had already made up its mind about the guilt of his client. The future of the NAACP, particularly financial support for the organization, depended on his success in cases like this one. As if these pressures weren’t enough, Marshall had to improvise his client’s defense with an untested accomplice at his side. He didn’t know where his attitude and talents would take him, but they would have to be enough. And all the while, he carried his own baggage.

During the same interview Reginald Hudlin, the film’s director, emphasized that the Marshall he wanted to portray was not an angel but a saint. He explained the difference this way:

Well an angel kind of implies perfection. A saint means, you know, you push through your humanity. You do something greater than.

That’s what Chance the Rapper wanted those young audiences in Chicago to see. A flawed individual, not unlike them, pushing through his circumstances and his humanity.

There is some real hope in that.

The Regret-Free Encore Career

February 14, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Sometimes regret is what you feel when it’s too late to do much about it—your deathbed, most commonly. But we also feel regret when there’s plenty of time left. All that stands in the way is our reluctance to recover the opportunities that are still out there, waiting for us.

The voice of regret over the road not taken most often has the whine of excuse about it. I couldn’t afford to take the chance. I’m over-extended. I’m too tired. I need to be better prepared. I can’t do this alone. I have too many obligations. My family won’t be on-board. What will other people think?

What if I fail?

By the time the excuses begin, the flirting with the new and unfamiliar has usually passed. You’ve pulled yourself back into the comfortable territory where you started. Your heart rate is back to normal, what you feared is now safely behind you. The only residue that remains is regret around what might have been. What if I had pushed a little farther, taken the chance, grabbed the brass ring when it appeared, trusted my instincts, trusted myself?

I spoke to an accomplished group of senior managers this week. In their fifties and sixties mostly, all were in or between Big Jobs. Some of them were also caught between seeing themselves doing those Big Jobs and, well, just sitting at home not doing them.

These are pretty stark alternatives. The good news is that there’s a way to get to the productive work all of us still need to do, and it doesn’t involve trapping yourself between this kind of all or nothing.

Limiting your future to a corner office is unrealistic if there simply aren’t enough corner offices to either barricade yourself in or catapult yourself back into. Your chances may simply be better elsewhere.

Moreover, if you’re not in that corner office today, maybe there’s a good reason that you’re not, a reason that involves your temperament, your skills, or your inability to read the handwriting on the wall. So why not step back and make a plan for your future work now that squarely confronts your deficits, acknowledges the value of your native talents, and aligns your next job with the best vision that you have of yourself?

Honestly confronting your deficits could mean honing existing skills or mastering new ones. But as often as not it’s learning to be more adaptable to changing circumstances. That is, a lot more resilient than you are today.

If you’re too rigid, you may simply need to become more adaptable. Stated differently, if your Boomer Balloon is filled with too much stale air, it may be time to let some of the stale air out and some fresh air in.

The best way to do so is by throwing yourself into circumstances where you’re not comfortable, where the particular improvements you need to find can only come—one dogged attempt at a time—with failure as your teacher. That’s the path to resilience. The question is really a pretty simple one: Are you tough enough to know when you need to toughen up?

On the other hand, time spent on deficit reduction should never mask what fueled your accomplishment in the first place. Identify the skills that have always given you the most pride when you’ve exercised them, and build your future on the highly transferable talents that have always set you apart. It’s a waste of time being bitter that strangers in the job market aren’t valuing these talents enough, but you’d be a fool to undervalue them yourself.

Finally, while you’re busy being honest with yourself, also consider investing some of the optimism you’ve been mustering as the candidate for the next Big Job around those things you always wished you had done, but were never brave enough or wise enough to have done before.

The land of your regrets is where you think about the grreat job that got away, the kind of work that quickens your heart beat and makes your palms sweat when you think about it, like helping to solve a real world problem, or meeting real needs for different products or better services than anyone else is providing.

There are challenges out there with your name on them. With focus and tenacity, you can figure out a way to not only make a living by confronting them, but also to live more fully and to find a better balance of effort and fulfillment than you have ever enjoyed before.

It’s the time in our lives when age, experience and self-confidence can also be good teachers, when we let them.

The irony, of course, is that once you build yourself a regret-free encore career, you’ll find yourself wondering why you ever spent your time putting all your eggs in the basket of that next Big Job.

Just Plain Funny #2

December 16, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I like a newspaper I can hold in my hands because sometimes the stories across the folds can talk to one another in ways that never seems to happen on a screen. That kind of exchange took place in my newspaper today.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, the Wall Street Journal has a funny, odd or just plain ridiculous story at the bottom of Page One. At some point, the Page One editor must have decided that stories like this are good antidotes to the calamities, logjams and shenanigans chronicled above. These daily stories always froth over to the last page of the “news” where they brush up against the beginnings of the “commentary” section on the other side of fold. It’s here that strangely compatible bedfellows sometimes meet.

Page One’s dollop of the day today was about a long-standing West Point tradition celebrating the graduating cadet, who by academic and other standards, finishes dead last in his class each year. Because of some “informal” information sharing, everyone but The Goat knows who he is on the big day, and when his name is called out from the graduating roster, the cadets erupt into the loudest cheer of the day.

There are two kinds of Goats, according to a disappointingly dry piece in a publication called Failure Magazine. There are cadets who labor through the muck to the bitter end, and those who take the experience just seriously enough to fall inebriatedly over the finish line. Of course, several of the Good Time Goats were actually pretty smart and went on to make history (Generals Custer and Pickett, for example). Several middling cadets did pretty well too. (Eisenhower reportedly said: “If anybody saw signs of greatness in me while at West Point they kept it to themselves.”) But it’s the ones who always struggled to do their best, while barely making it to the end, who are the real heroes of the story.

Unclear whether to be embarrassed or proud of their accomplishment, most of these Goats eventually seem to settle into being good sports about it. For example: “In my class, no one else can say that they’re the Goat and no one else can say that they’re part of this special lineage that dates back so far,” said good sport Roberto Becarra, Jr. in 2007. Somewhat earlier, the bespeckled Goat (below) seems to have had a similar reaction.

When asked about these persevering Goats by the Journal reporter, James S. Robbins said:

The tradition of the Goat is important because it kind of encapsulates that American spirit of—yeah, you’re going to have the top and they’re going to get recognized and they’re going to get stars by their names and all that other stuff. But, you know what? The guys further down, they have their chance too, and they can succeed too and it’s important to recognize them.

While his insight might have been more penetrating had he been a psychologist or meteorologist instead of an historian, Robbins’ remarks did manage to counterpoint similar observations about the value of “keeping your head up” and “putting one foot in front of the other” on the facing page of the paper, where a Journal writer reviews a new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Antifragile.

Taleb’s singular perspective is that theories follow practice instead of the reverse. It’s not “the Soviet/Harvard notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to.” We learn by doing it first, and make up the theories that contain all of our how-to-do-it wisdom later on. It is, as the reviewer notes, “a startling [chicken v. egg] insight,” because what Taleb’s debunking allows is a flat-out celebration of the creativity involved in doggedly keeping at it. The many virtues of trial and error.

Taleb makes up the word “antifragile” to mean not only hardy, but also something that has been improved through repeated failures, becoming more resilient in the process. From this perspective, the persevering Goats are not just plodders: more than a few of them embody the adaptation that is at the beating heart of natural selection. As Taleb’s reviewer notes:

If trial and error is creative, then we should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.

This is why experience is the best teacher. It’s why “A” students who master the theory often work for the “B” and “C” students who rightly suspect that the magic lies elsewhere. It’s why rigidity and too much seriousness is always a bad idea. And it’s why the loudest cheer really should go to somebody who has not only failed most prominently, but also has the spirit to get up and keep trying.

modern-times — CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN “MODERN TIMES”

Not that it’s always so easy.