In Defense of Waiting, or Revisiting an Issue

Photo by David Billings on Unsplash

This post was originally written in early 2024, but I shelved it for several reasons which likely included getting busy with other things.

In light of recent events, most notably President Biden's decision to withdraw his candidacy for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination and the ensuing kerfuffle around Vice President Harris's campaign and Former President Trump's abrupt change in messaging, this seems like an appropriate time to post my previous sentiments.

There are people out there in all media channels, but particularly in social media channels, who are saying bad things. Not just inappropriate, but objectively BAD things. Hurtful things. Things that hurt not just their intended target, but also hurt others who can connect the dots between the comment and their own identity.

People say mean things far too often and try to excuse it as humor, reflexivity, or (my least favorite because it reveals a massive misunderstanding of an important concept) "free speech". I humbly ask you to stand up and say something when you witness these wrongs. Not just to folks whose candidates or opinions you oppose, but perhaps especially to those whose candidates or opinions you support.

I'll make a separate post about the commentary and "memes" that are circulating as we speak in the next couple of days or so. Meanwhile, I encourage you to read the following post and to check out the sourced pieces linked below. They are worthy of our consideration.

Hello, World. A Happy 2024 to you all.

I had a nice exchange with someone on FB Messenger the other day. They reminded me of some...ahem...discussions we had leading up to the 2016 presidential election. I used to be a lot more cavalier with my thoughts and opinions back then, and those thoughts and opinions have changed in some instances (though they also have remained the same and grown even stronger in others). The larger point I wanted to make echoes a point made by constitutional law professor Noah Feldman on a podcast recently when asked what the duty was for the average American in the face of a democracy under stress:

"What the average American has to do is ask what outcome is best for the country that I want my grandchildren to inherit? Not, am I right or am I wrong now, but what will keep the system going? And it's my hope that people will look when they vote, for their local officials, and for their national officials, and when they go to protests, and when they speak at city council meetings and school board meetings, remember that you can't run a country if the people on the other side are bad people.

And so, and I think this is our responsibility. Morality is important. There's right and there's wrong. And you should stand for what's right and what's wrong. But if you think that everyone who disagrees with you is fundamentally a bad person, then why are you in a country with them?

It's not gonna work. We have to be able to say about the people we most disagree with, I disagree with you, you're wrong, your views might even be bad, but you're not a bad person, you're someone who I respect at the level of the fact that you in conscience care. And that I think is the responsibility that we genuinely can all exercise and we can exercise it at every level."

Despite what some of you may think, we have a duty not to lose site of the humanity in those with whom we disagree. That perspective is the exclusive domain of the members of our military actively engaged in (or preparing to be engaged in) combat. And despite our culture's penchant for using military metaphors widely and loosely, we are not at war with one another nor should we be.

So as we gear up for another year of contention, hyperbole, squabble, misinformation, rage, disappointment, and varying degrees of horseshit, I encourage you all to consider engaging with those who hold views that differ from your own. And when you do, do so gracefully. If you're so inclined, pray for your "enemies". They want to leave peaceful lives. They want their children and loved ones to be safe, healthy, and prosperous. They want to be happy or, at the very least, at ease.

One of my oldest and dearest friends has made it virtually impossible to view sporting events together because they misattribute failings and mistakes. It's always the referees showing bias or the coach mishandling the game. It's never the players failing to execute or the opposing team simply performing better.

We would do well to apply the same rigor of analysis to all the information we receive. I believe one of the most important things we can do to promote understanding and respect is to stop treating every "news" event as a turf battle. When we hear some outlandish charge leveled against some public official, rather than responding with some variant of "typical GOP SOB/libtard MF'er", maybe we should think "I wonder what other people are saying about this story". We may still draw the same conclusions, but at least we understand the version of facts those with differing opinions are using.

I've got a lot of opinions about how we got to where we are with regards to the news. If anyone really wants to hear about them, let me know and maybe I'll make a future post for discussion. Meanwhile, consider the following opinion piece from the Kansas City Star's David Mastio. I would personally consider it a major victory if we could jointly as a society and culture at least approach the place where we all could see a common view of reality, even if it's on the horizon.

Foundational Work

Legacy is a tricky thing.

When we think about the common understanding of the word "legacy", we often consider it to be a summation of output. There's a finality to the word. Financial advisors speak to their retirement clients about "legacy planning", which translates roughly into "what do you want to leave behind when you die?"

Really? The only time we contemplate our past is when we're coming to the end of the road?

That's not only morbid, but a waste of opportunity. 

Santayana famously warned that "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it". Implied in that statement is the corollary that history has things to teach us for today. And to whose history have we had a unique front row seat? Our own.

I've been spending some time lately thinking about a podcast from Strategic Coach's Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller called "Recognize The Value Of Your Past For Business Success And A Bigger Future". Sullivan posits that your past has unique value because no one else owns it. Others can look at it and attempt to ascribe descriptions or context to it, but those descriptions and context only mean anything if you allow them to mean something. Your past is 100% yours, and your story is what you say it is. Because you own your past, you're free to use your past as the history that guides your present and your future using your own personal lessons from your previous experiences and observations.

The conversation reminded me of the lessons I learned reading Man's Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl, a book listed in a 1991 Library of Congress survey as one of the Ten Most Influential Books in the United States, and that Tim Ferriss revealed in 2021 as the most frequent answer when he asks his guests for book recommendations. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy (Greek for "healing through meaning"), and argued that the search for meaning was the central human motivational force. A significant portion of the book details Frankl's time in Nazi concentration camps. One of the book's most cited passages is Frankl's realization during a particularly bleak episode:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Today, I happened to read a new Rolling Stone interview with Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins. I was deeply involved with music in the '90's, and the Pumpkins hold a special place for me. During one particular personal valley when I was at my most down and out, living in New York City (or perhaps more accurately surviving), I scraped together enough money to buy an album as soon as it came out: Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadeness. That album was one of a handful that I would listen to repeatedly, either on my Walkman or in my car, and feel better about my existence.

Corgan has become quite candid over the last few years. He was seen as hostile in the '90's and '00's, and there was a time when his career was largely seen as finished (with many in the press seeing that end as a result of Corgan's own faults and failings). This new interview, however, underlines Frankl's themes and the podcast's point: no one really knew what was going on but Billy. No one saw the whole story but him. And once he started looking at where he had been, what had happened, and what he wanted, he used the past and it's lessons as both a foundation for his creative work and (I would argue) as fuel to sustain him through the creative process and the inevitable comparisons and reminders from his past. And now he's happy. And quite successful on his own terms. As he states in the interview:

"Here’s what I would say. If you haven’t graduated at this point, then you become one of those Sunset Boulevard characters that’s holding onto something that’s really far in the rearview mirror."

It's not merely enough to own your past. You've got to understand it, grow from it, and move forward. 

I'm currently coming out of what has been a personally turbulent period. One of the things that leads me to be optimistic about where I am and where I'm headed is a good hard clear-eyed look at my past. I own my mistakes. I own my successes. And I own my history; what I've done, what's been done to me, and what I've witnessed. I own my legacy, but it's far from complete. It's the foundation upon which I'll build whatever comes next. It's been examined, inspected, and to an extent, shored up where needed. And with that, as a great man once said, "Onward and upward."

Letting Go (Life and Death and Life, Pt. 2)

(Meandering long post below. Either settle in or come back to it. - jrr)

 It's New Year's Eve, 2022. We're fast approaching 2023, which means that a noticeable segment of many media channels will be filled with self-proclaimed pundits bemoaning the past year based on their politics, aesthetics, social life, financial situation, or what have you. But I'm okay with giving 2022 all the time it needs.

My mother died this year. 

This was an unexpected turn. My mother's side of the family has been blessed with longevity for generations, particularly its women. I fully expected that Mom would live long enough to see her potential great-grandchildren. At least another ten years, with fifteen seeming utter reasonable.

Then she started having a pain in her side. It's important to note that my mother had quite an extensive medical history, and hearing about various maladies was just part of the territory. I don't want that to sound cold or insensitive (although maybe it is; I'm still working through that), but merely that a doctor's visit wasn't a particularly big deal on its face. And then suddenly it was...kind of.

Her examination revealed a mass by her liver as the source of her pain. Even then, I still wasn't particularly worried as they scheduled a biopsy. This would be another in a history of problems that weren't as big as they could have been. Life would continue.

The diagnosis said otherwise. It was bile duct cancer, stage four. Google it. It's not good.

How bad? The best case scenario at her age was chemo and radiation, with a fifty per cent chance she would be around an extra six months. But six months from when. Her oncologist said it would be a coin flip on whether she would see Christmas.

We received this news in July. She didn't see Halloween.

I wrote a post in September about the act of burial. Obviously, my mother's remaining time was weighing heavily on my mind, and I wrote that piece with a plan to follow it up here. QED.

Today is my mother's memorial service. I will eulogize my mother, as I did my father. I may or may not bury my mother. She donated her body to science, and my sister and I haven't fully decided yet whether to intern or scatter her remains when they're returned to us. So I can't really extend the burial discussion I opened in my September post, at least not yet.

I have a bias toward profundity. Words mean things. They have always meant things even before they were a meme or a slogan or t-shirt or coffee mug. I grew up with an acute understanding of this concept. My father reinforced this concept throughout my childhood. That's probably another post worth of material at least. I say this to emphasize the effort and precision with which I choose my words, and to underscore the personal importance I place on communicating in a very deliberate manner. Particulary when I perceive the stakes as high. Like now.

The remembrance I wrote for my mother has to serve a number of purposes. It's intended to honor her, and celebrate her as a person. But there's more going on. It's meant to comfort, and explain, and contextualize, and clarify, and synopsize. And then get delivered both in written and oral form. For audiences who both knew her and never met her. It's meant to be sufficiently respectful, considerate, honest, and reverent. It should hold the interest of the audience, but shouldn't be self-serving.

People use words for lots of reasons. They use them for attention, for release, for reward. They use them to encourage, to harm, to incite, to calm, to explain, to obfuscate. They use them to record, to entertain, to agitate, to heal.

I wrote my mother's eulogy to say goodbye. And I failed. Because there was no way I could succeed.

Time marches on, whether we participate or not. I can't keep 2022 around anymore than I could accomplish any other feat of futility. And I can't have my mother alive anymore than I can have my father or the other friends and family I've lost back.

But I can say the things I'm saying for all the reasons I've stated. And as a testament to a point in time.

I want to have just a little more time in 2022. A little more time with Mom. A little more time before goodbye. 

But goodbyes are inevitable, just like time. And I'd rather say goodbye than miss the opportunity to do so.

I was lucky to actually say goodbye to my mother. Some people don't get that chance. If you're one of those people, my heart goes out to you. That's a wound that's hard to close. I know. But as time continues apace, we need to close those wounds. We need to apply balms and ointments and bandages, and heal. We have to prepare ourselves to bring joy and happiness and love and mercy to the other people who are still here, who need us, who deserve smiles and hugs and laughter. And that has to start somewhere. 

And what better time than New Year's Eve?

May your day be full of celebration and reflection. May you lay down old hurts, and reach out for new joys. May you be filled with gratitude, and released from regret. I'll join you in the effort. Tomorrow. 

For today, I still have to let go.