Sitting at Voxx coffee, which is one my favorite few coffee shops in Seattle,  and recognizing oh-so-well the blind aimless blundering that made up the bulk of my life in 2008-2009.  Remember Scooby-Doo?  One of the kids’ tricks was to throw something – a blanket, a bucket, a barrel – over the head of the bad guy, and he’d go running around stumbling into posts and walls while the kids made their hasty escape.

I feel like that guy.  In retrospect! Right at the moment my head is less enveloped in fog and I can see forward and backward with a clarity I didn’t have at the time.  I suppose that’s human nature, to be hyper-focused on the critical moment and lose some perspective, only to recognize later the narrow tunnel through which one journeyed.

I now walk with my head up, looking forward, and finding lots of interesting life out there to observe and interact with.  Professionally, personally, and in that gray area between the two that I predict will make up more and more of our collective shared space in the years to come.  Work friends who are actually friends, and friend friends who you occasionally get together and work with.  Partners with whom you do business with, either explicitly in the old-school LLC “let’s go into business together” model, or, more likely, with whom you have an implicit, but no less important, relationship, all parties sharing the same goal of supporting and encouraging each other in separate domains.  The sounding boards.  The devil’s advocates.  The constructive criticizers.

Reciprocal muses. Your Zelda to my F. Scott. My Beatrice to your Dante.

Think of this as two possibilities: on the one hand, a tandem bicycle – both riders pedaling the same machine in the same direction at the same pace – vs. two separate bicycles; yes, both going in the same direction at the same speed, but with an acknowledged – I will say necessary – distance between them. 

It’s this distance that fascinates me right now.  Too much – too far — and the other fades into the background noise, part of the cacophony of everyday life; the half-known and the partially-recognized and the almost-important; too close, however, and that slight gap, into which the arc of electricity, the firing of the synapses, the place into which the mysterious alchemy of true collaboration (at all levels) takes place, gets squashed and squeezed and cramped.  It’s like placing a candle snuffer over an incipient flame.

Distance is a funny and confounding thing, though.  I think most of us are hardwired to clutch, to grab, to possess, to hold – not to “see the other whole against the wide sky”, to pull a quote from Rilke – but to see narrowly right through the other’s pupils, as it were.  Some people are conditioned by family or circumstance to feel lonely, dispossessed, and despairing when distance separates them from their desires.  And there’s a certain (illusory?) comfort in falling in to the other, collapsing the gap, willingly giving up individual purpose in pursuit of a more immediately comforting embrace.

Is it possible to develop and carry a new paradigm around in one’s head?  To recognize that some distance – however slight, and in whatever dose is comfortable – is not only valuable, but required? To leave space for the relationship to flower, the collaboration to germinate, the partnership to bear fruit?

I think so.  I hope so.  My curiosity on the matter is waxing strongly.  My personal vectors are all reorienting themselves along the lines of this hypothesis.

The classic – and metaphorical – advice is, when you get thrown from your horse, jump right back on again.  The moral is that you shouldn’t let temporary setbacks prevent you from continuing to try to get where you want to go and do what you want to do.

The Japanese saying is “fall down seven times, stand up eight.”

Sometimes, though, you have to jump on a different horse.  A horse of a different color, as it were.  You’ve been knocked you so irrevocably off your perch that you feel like you have no choice but to try a different direction.  Maybe you’ve been thrown so often that it just makes perfect, plain sense to try a different route to get somewhere.

You may feel forced to make this decision – to abandon one path, admit defeat, give up, accept failure – but in reality it’s your choice.  No one is whispering directives in your ear.  You can choose.  And failing is not always your fault, because you certainly can’t control everything, or everyone.

Sometimes when I get knocked down I lose perspective, especially when the place I get knocked down from is important – i.e. the place is (or was) part of my overall picture of who I am and what I want and where and where I see myself going.  But we all get knocked down.  And we all lose perspective.  The trick is to take a deep breath, look around, and see what other good things are going on that we can focus on to help us get back on our feet.

For example, just in the past few days:

• I’ve been reminded of how awesome some of my friends are.
• I’ve been told by someone I’m one of the most brilliant people that they know.
• I’ve been invited to several parties.
• I’ve had lots of good signs on the career/work front.
• Despite the holidays, I now weigh less than at any time since 1994.
• I’ve inspired someone to start their own 100-day exercise challenge.
• My kids are wonderful and beautiful and smart and happy.
• Someone else told me they were jealous of me.

So, what can I really complain about?  Not much. So one or two things haven’t worked out and won’t work out.  But I have a lot of good things going on, wonderful things, and I can’t let my happiness (a) depend solely on the outcome of one thing, no matter how important; and (b) depend on what others do, as opposed to what I can do for myself.

This is hard, no question – some things seem so undeniably positive that you just can’t see yourself not being there.  But life is a series of ups and downs, and it’s valuable to understand that life has its hard moments.  Reflect, accept, learn, and be who you are meant to be, stronger and more resilient for having gone through the experience.

In the grand scheme of things, there are few things that deserve to be called “grand” – using the term “grand” to mean important, vast, worthy of attention.  Too many little things float by the rivers of our lives, flotsam and jetsam of the daily collisions we create with ourselves and with others, and too little and too late do we pay attention to the rapids, the waterfalls, or, on the positive side, the occasional vistas that draw our breath out of us in a merciful, appreciative sigh.

It’s all about perspective.  From the perspective of a ping-pong ball, life looks pretty fucking traumatic and unpredictable.  From the perspective of an oak tree, old and strong and silent, life looks pretty stable.  Can we choose?  Or rather, more properly, how do we choose?   What tools do we have at our disposal to turn our attention away from the microscopic, the transitional, the inconsequential, and toward the universal, the long-term, the truly important?

I don’t know.  Things like “bucket lists” and the Franklin-Covey planning system seem too naive, too simplistic.  Sometimes I think that the answer is to tilt the whole goddamned table the right way, and everything will miraculously roll into its correct place.  Of course that’s wishful thinking.

Sometimes we’re jolted awake.  Sad news arrives, and we’re taken out of ourselves, out of our own experience, and we realize how we look at ourselves.  It’s as if the mirror we use to observe ourselves is fogged over, shrouded in layers of habit and reaction and imprecise memories, rendering our reflection in distorted chiaroscuro.  We squint: do we recognize ourselves?  Who is that person staring back at me?

While we’re awake, we’re no longer floating below the surface of the water – we’re raised up, brought to the surface, and can understand and appreciate the world around us, in all its wonder and (yes) sadness.  But at these times we’re experiencing things as part of the world, and not as separate from it.  We’re connected, in whatever small way, to the world and those around us.

There’s a sort of circular argument approaching: to fully understand and connect to others in the world, we need to understand ourselves; yet to fully understand ourselves, we need to understand and connect to others.  Chicken, or egg?  Is this a false choice?  Can we work both in tandem?   Be good to yourself AND be good to others.  That seems doable.

I saw your face in a dark cloudbank today.  The image was transitional, transitory, partially occluded; I could not tell even after several minutes if the clouds were clearing and moving on, or thickening, darkening, preparing for a wet pass over the Starbucks in which I was reading.  Was your face coming or going?  Was the image growing stronger or fainter?  I could not tell at first.

I spent most of the day talking with some very interesting people about choice, hope, change, and control.  One effect of such lively, far-reaching discussion is that it urges – one might say forces – a sense of renewed perspective.  Items beyond one’s control recede to the side stage; items that one can control assume a more central position.  I found it interesting that this phenomenon is the same as that I’ve observed recently while actively journaling.  Perhaps just the act of paying careful attention – via written word or active conversation – is the catalyst for enhancing and maintaining perspective.

I used to be a very interested observer of clouds.  I always got some sense of relief, pleasure, or euphoria out of a broad diverse white vista spreading out for miles above my head.  I would occasionally take photos of interesting cloud formations.  Over the last few years I’ve lost that pleasure.  Clouds became part of the rest of the landscape – nothing special.  I’ve missed that.  I’ve occasionally taken it as a metaphor for adulthood, assuming that we lose the ability to take private, boyish pleasure in everyday things, to make them our own, to imbue them with secret meanings and metaphors, to uniquely identify ourselves by those different, innocuous interests we take in things.  “I like clouds” was something I could always say about myself through most of my life.

So when I saw your face, dark and looming, full of stormy portent, I was of two minds.  A reminder of things lost for good in adulthood, or an indication of wishful thinking for things past?  Fear of attempting to reclaim past feelings?  All? Neither?  Who can tell?  All I can say for sure was that I observed this particular dark cloudbank with a sense of perspective that I’ve lacked recently.   Instead of immediacy, I felt an appropriate distance.  Instead of poignancy, I felt calm.  Instead of numbness, I felt…strangely normal.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s hard to gauge progress in anything based on a single day.  Unless, one supposes, you’re one of those bugs whose entire lifespan is measured in hours.  Golf has four days to determine outcomes.  The EPL has 40.  Baseball has 162.  Life?  Life should be measured in months or years, not days, so it’s hard to put too much credence in the results of a single day, particularly when the signals one received are so uncertainly interpreted.  However, as days go recently, this one was good.  That’s been a big ask lately, but I was happy to have it.

Is hysteria an inevitabale social phenomenon? Right now we’re riding the downside of a wave of swine flu hysteria, in which schools are closing, travel is restricted between some countries, and the WHO just declared a pandemic (even if the declaration is a technicality).

A few years ago, we went through a similar episode with Mad Cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and tens of thousands of cows were put down, beef imports were curtailed or eliminated, and the world’s agricultural industry held its breath.

I’m not too interested in animal-related pandemics (avian flu would be another), but more interested in the societal phenomenon of hysteria. Not necessarily mass hysteria of the OMG-the-world-is-going-to-end variety, but hysteria brought on by a lack of perspective. In all the recent pandemics, fewer people died than those who slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and hit their head. The level of reaction – or overreaction if you will – was grossly out of proportion to the evidence.

A couple thoughts. First, does modern mass media and/or distributed real-time media fuel or temper societal hysteria? I think you could argue pretty convincingly that mass media fuels it, due to the echo chamber effect, whereas internet-driven realtime media tempers the impulse, due to the sheer number of outlets, interests, and mini-communities of interest. Second, is societal hysteria a byproduct of the individual tendency to hysteria, or is it a phenomenon that is unique to groups? We all have a tendency to overdramatize and lose perspective from time to time, as I wrote yesterday – does this reverberate into our shared societal rhythms?

During the Mad Cow episode, England was the hardest hit of all countries, with some estimates claiming 50% infection rates in cattle herds and financial losses of up to $50 billion. That’s a lot of tangible evidence to support the hysteria, even if the infection vector was not adequately known. This is interesting to me because the English have historically been known as reserved, anti-hysterical types – stiff upper lip, and all that – and so the tension between national norms and actual hysteria-inducing circumstances was interesting to watch.

Individually, we are all Englishmen or otherwise – with a lesser or greater tendency toward hysteria and lack of perspective – and I’m really curious how individual circumstances and upbringing lead one toward one or the other pole. I’m pretty convinced, based on recent personal events, that one could design a study that proved conclusively that certain types of circumstances lead one inexorably toward a dramatic lack of perspective, regardless of individual upbringing. Or perhaps not – that’s the beauty of philosophical arguments; one can never quite be sure that one has the opposing argument in checkmate.

Imagine a one-eyed man playing kickball. Pretty f***ing difficult – hard to kick the ball coming at you, because you can’t tell how far away it is, and right next to impossible to catch the ball flying at you. That second eye gives you the gift of perspective – to be able to see how close or far away things are, to be able put them in their proper relation to each other.

When we lack perspective, things are too TOO. Too important, too close, too critical, too, … whatever. We get hyped up, aroused, overstimulated, overemotional. Time and distance help to realign things, but during those first close moments, everything is topsy-turvy, turbulent, and theatrical. Things become elegant and impractical, like fine china. Time gets distorted; mere seconds seem like hours while they occur, but looking back entire days go by without much getting done.

The key to kickball, if I may be allowed to pontificate for a second, after having attended my first kickball scrimmage since the 1980’s, is perspective. And, pontificating further, one of the keys to living your life in the best way possible is also having perspective. I’m not saying don’t dive off the cliff blindfolded every now and then. I’m saying that keeping perspective allows you to choose the right cliff

Thoughts?