scam
Most people who read my blog know me first and foremost as an author. So they are surprised when they learn that I do other things as well. (And conversely, those whose first dealings with me center on one of those other areas are always surprised to find that I’m also an author.)
Well, one of those other things I do is designing information systems. I’ve done this since I was a child and home computers first came out. But as far this story is concerned, here’s the simple version: I build fancy stuff with spreadsheets. Often, it’s stuff that few other people can figure out. And for that reason, I always have clients who seek me out and pay me well for this work (which I fit in between my writing and marketing and mentoring and…)
You might think these two worlds are incongruous, but in my mind, they’re just different ways of helping people. And I am passionate about infusing both with core values such as kindness.
To that end, I choose to donate a little time each week as I’m able to helping answer posts on a couple of free online forums. Typically, I can only volunteer about a half hour or so per week; but I can get a lot done in that time, considering that the forums are designed to help people with relatively small stuff. A little knowledge sharing here. A formula tweak there.
Recently, I read a forum post from someone who appeared to be located in Romania, and who was requesting spreadsheet help. But in assessing things, what he required wasn’t small stuff. It was a highly customized, time-intensive solution (i.e., real work).
Usually, I’ll just pass over such posts or suggest that the person consider hiring a developer. In this particular case, however, I made the choice to “break my rule” and try to help the guy out anyway. You see, I’ve been especially aware lately of the need for tenacious worldwide kindness. And while it wouldn’t bring about world peace, going the extra mile for this stranger in Bucharest seemed a good opportunity to put feet to my convictions.
Still, it was a bit tricky. Sharing complex solutions on a free forum would create unrealistic future expectations for site visitors. In addition, I can’t offer in a free public forum the same level of complex work that my private clients pay me for.
But my mind was made up. I was going to help this guy (I’ll call him “Ivo” here).
Since Ivo’s shared spreadsheet contained his email address, I reached out to him privately rather than through the public forum. I introduced myself. I explained essentially what I’ve shared with you here: that I am a longtime forum contributor, that the help he required went beyond what I could provide through the free forum, but that I was willing to help him at no cost if he would simply share a copy of the sample spreadsheet with me.
Some hours later, his email reply popped up.
As I try to keep this blog family friendly, I’ll have to do some censoring:
“You bet. You [#&%@!] poor [*!@~$] scammer, eat [&$^#%]. Maybe that’s more useful to support your laughable existence.”
Here, I’d offered him free work —work I’d have charged any other client $150 for—and this was his response?
What would you have done at this point, if you had been me?
*****
I won’t lie. My initial reaction was to bristle. Hey, I’m human, just like you.
I mean, I owed this guy nothing. I didn’t need to help him in the first place. He wasn’t a paying client. And I would certainly have been well within my “rights” to dismiss him at this point. Just one more self-absorbed, entitled jerk in the world.
Shrug it off. Press “Delete.” Move on. Right?
Instead, right after that initial sense of self flared up at Ivo’s response—in the next moment, where choice begins—I was given a good dose of my own advice from previous books:
“Humility is a strength, not a weakness.”
“Focus on the person, not the problem.”
“Kindness still works.”
Add to this that I’m just about to release my third book, Alternate Reality (just released: April 2022!). As part of the editing process, I’ve read through the entire thing about ten times by now. And that has meant being intensely confronted with even more of my own words, including this new piece of shared advice:
“Instead of thinking the worst about people,
wonder the best.”
Right about the time I was reading Ivo’s email, you might imagine that I was applying this bit of advice to him. “Wow, here I am going the extra mile to be kind to a stranger, and he replies with such rudeness, accusing me of being a scammer?” But rather than thinking in terms of his choices, I found myself considering my own.
Would I think the worst of this guy based on his rude response? Or would I practice what I preach and make the choice to wonder the best about him?
I chose to wonder the best. I shifted my focus from what he had done—to why he might have done it. And that brought a new response: empathy.
I responded to Ivo’s email. I told him that I understood why he might be skeptical; after all, the world is a weird place sometimes. I offered him four different means of verifying who I was, for his own peace of mind, and again extended the offer of help.
I’d like to tell you that the clouds parted, that birds started chirping and that a swell of rhapsodic music began to play. Alas, it did not. My heartfelt email was ignored.
Surely, now was the time to dust off my hands and forget about this guy. I mean, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. And I want to be exceedingly clear here: that is true. As had been the case from the start, I owed this stranger nothing. I would not have been a bad person to walk away. And on the flip side, I wasn’t earning any cosmic brownie points if I chose to stick with it. All I can tell you is that, at the time, I felt compelled to try once more.
After a few days, I emailed Ivo again. I told him that I wondered if his skepticism was based in personal circumstances that had burnt him. And so, rather than continuing with my request for a shared spreadsheet, I worked out the entire complex formula in a spreadsheet of my own and then copied and pasted it directly into the email for him. I carefully explained how to implement it on his own sheet, asking only that he not post the formula publicly, so that I would not have that conflict of interest with other paying clients. I ended the email expressing my hope that this act of kindness might help restore his faith in humanity, even if only in some small way.
No birds chirping. No clouds parting. No music playing.
Instead, Ivo took my formula and did exactly what I’d asked him not to do: he posted it on the public forum. What’s more, he asked the larger community of volunteers there to confirm his earlier assumption that I was a scammer, and that this was malicious code. And to top it off, he implied in this public forum that I’d tried to get money out of him.
I’ll admit, my resolve to be kind was fraying around the edges at this point.
But I replied to his now public commentary as gently (yet directly) as I could. I reminded him that he could click my name link and be taken to the same profile I’d already sent him via email as one of four different means of verification. I asserted that I’d made very clear that my offer of help was free with no strings attached. I told him that I felt he was now just digging his heels in, committed to somehow proving that his initial assumption about me was true: that I was, in fact, a scammer. I told him that I couldn’t recall ever having worked so hard to give someone a free gift.
And then I remembered another piece of advice from The Best Advice So Far:
“Tenacious love expressed with creativity
can work wonders.”
It doesn’t always. But it can.
Allowing that "love" can be applied in both an individual and humanitarian sense, I determined to do the least likely thing.
I set aside my self-imposed rule of not posting complex work on the public forum, went into his publicly shared spreadsheet and implemented my full solution for him there, so that he could see with his own eyes that it was producing exactly the complex result he was hoping for.
I added one more comment, once again wishing him well and hoping that this might somehow restore in him a little faith in humanity.
And then, satisfied that I’d truly done all that was within the realm of my own choice to do, I let it go and moved on.
*****
The next day, I got a ding alerting me that Ivo had replied in the forum.
“Your solution works perfectly. I misread you and your motives. I owe you an apology.”
I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting that.
Yet as nice as that was, something still felt unresolved. Empathy kicked in again. I was aware that if other forum contributors read the exchange, they might avoid offering Ivo help on any future posts of his. So I offered a path to a “clean slate”—figuratively and literally. I suggested that he back through all of his comments and delete them, after which I would do the same. I’d already spent five times my weekly allotment of donated forum time on this one issue, but this seemed important.
Within a day, he had done just that: deleted all of his comments. I followed suit. Clean slate achieved.
Cue the singing birds.
But it didn’t stop there.
Two days later, I received an email reply from Ivo. Turns out, he’s from Latvia, not Romania. He apologized again and asked if he might get a second chance to undo that negative first impression he’d made.
He said he actually considered himself to be a kind and helpful person. He recalled to me the story of a woman he’d helped at a coffee shop late one night. In his words:
She told me she was an Uber driver and had just crashed. For some reason, she had no money and no phone. In addition to losing her only means of income, she mentioned that she also had cancer in her legs, and at one point she started crying. She asked for some cash and promised that she would give it back the next day at the nearby museum where she worked as a guard. We ended up walking to the ATM together, and I withdrew a hundred bucks. I gave it to her and she cried again a little, hugged me and thanked me enormously. It felt very good to be helpful to somebody in a great need!
And he never saw her again. No such person worked at the museum.
It had all been a scam.
Oh, and in case you're wondering (as I did) about how Uber and "bucks" match up with Latvia, this all happened to Ivo during his first and only trip to the United States. It happened in Washington, D.C.—where Ivo had had to make an emergency diversion to the Latvian embassy. You see, upon arrival in California, thieves had broken into Ivo's car and stolen everything they could get at, including his passport. Still, despite his own troubles, there he was trying to help this "poor woman" at the coffee shop.
You see, Ivo really wasn’t an awful, self-centered, ungrateful person. He was a nice guy who had just been hurt one time too many before I came along.
But the kindness I’d shown actually had turned the tide inside him. Again in his own words:
I think this experience will stick with me and will teach me a good lesson in the future as well.
Ivo and I have been talking back and forth for a little while now, having terrific conversations about stuff that matters. As it turns out, we have a lot in common. Yet we’re also learning from one another. Stretching our perspectives. And we’re just having fun getting to know one another.
Is kindness always rewarded with a happily-ever-after ending? Nope.
Will some people turn out to be as mean as they at first appeared? Yes.
Are scammers still out there scamming? They are.
But what, then? Should we all decide to live within the confines of our own little self-protective bubbles?
To never show spontaneous kindness again, because of those who might take advantage of it?
To just give up on hope? On humanity?
To me, that seems like the biggest scam of all.
Here’s another tidbit from The Best Advice So Far:
“Whatever you choose to do,
do it without expectations,
simply because you believe in doing it.”
Where that limit lies for each person and in each situation will vary. But my encounter with Ivo serves as yet another reminder that “you always have a choice.”
A choice to look beyond the what to the why.
A choice to focus on the person and not the problem.
A choice to trade thinking the worst for wondering the best.
Quite often, I’ve found, those “best wonderings” will be closer to the truth.
the builders
I was wakened from a sound sleep by the ungodly grinding of a saw cutting through what sounded like concrete or metal right outside my bedroom wall. The whole place shook, setting the nearby jar candles to skittering. It was immediately clear that this was not going to be a situation solved by fingers in the ears or pillows over the head. So I got up.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, there was a loud crunching and a thunk.
That sounds like it’s right in the house, I thought. And then the noise suddenly cut off. Moments later there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find one of the construction guys there wearing grubby jeans, a tank top and a backward ball cap. His ears were studded and gauged, and one tattooed arm leaned against the wall of the stairwell that leads up to my floor. “Hey, um… what’s on the inside of the wall we’re working on?”
I knew something very bad had happened. “My bedroom,” I informed him. “Bedroom closet to be exact.”
I led him through the entryway and into the bedroom. I live in an old farmhouse with open closets, so I had used the bedroom closet for storage, placing a low white bench with drawers and storage cubbies in front of it on top of which a full-length mirror leaned back against the door opening. I took down the mirror.
The workers had broken through the outside wall into the room, a five-foot strip of the wall revealing daylight beyond. But that wasn’t what caused the sharp inhale or widening of my eyes.
It was the horde of ants covering the walls… and everything else inside. Coolers. Lawn chairs. Luggage. Bedding. I could get at none of it until I removed the plastic storage bins. But those, as it happened, were impaled on a large bolt that had come through the wall. Meanwhile, the ants were happily beginning to explore outside the closet.
As this isn’t really about the incident, I’ll montage. Cracked bins ripped through. Running back and forth to the fire exit stairs with closet contents, even as ants ran up my arms and dropped into the other rooms. Workers doing impromptu extermination with a shop-vac. The cloying fog of Raid fumes permeating.
Throughout the ordeal, I’ll admit that I growled aloud more than once. And since the construction worker was doing his best to contain the situation, I wanted to be clear that my irritation was with the situation and not with him. I said as much to him, followed by stating aloud some of my own advice (more for my sake than his): “These are the times when I have to ask myself, ‘Will this matter in a year?’ And if the answer is no—which it is in this case—then it’s not worth wasting time in the present getting up in arms about it.”
Thus began my conversation with the builder.
If you were to have driven by my house and seen this guy standing outside on his ladder, swinging his hammer, you probably wouldn’t have given him much thought. Just another common laborer. And if you had noticed him beyond this peripheral glance, you might have made assumptions about him based on his job, clothes and tattoos—assumptions about his background, lifestyle, intelligence, education level, worldview.
But allow me to tell you what I learned about him.
As I say, the temporary crisis didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. However, mere minutes into our interaction together, we found ourselves talking openly about stuff that did matter.
His name is Zach. He’d been raised by two women. One was his mother. The other was his grandmother, a woman for whom he now happily served as a primary caregiver. Every day. Like clockwork. His expression of love and respect for his mom and grandmother, and his happiness to help, were among the first things he told me.
Zach shared with me some of the pain he experienced growing up and the problems it led to in his early adulthood. But he’d worked hard to overcome those issues.
He’s a voracious reader who enjoys deep conversations about life.
In fact, he’s been having an ongoing conversation online with a young Muslim man from the Middle East. This distant friend had shared his desire to visit the United States, but expressed his concerns about how he might be treated because of his ethnicity or religion. Zach was honest with him. “Some people here will be suspicious and act on fear. But many, many won’t.” He invited the young man to stay with him personally should he make the trip, promising to introduce him to good people and places.
Zach is educated. Prior to being a builder, Zach had been the director of a public school program for kids on the autism spectrum or with other behavior-related challenges. He told me about some of his students over the years, adding that he’d finally decided he needed to take a break because his compassion for the kids was starting to get the better of him even during his off time. He felt he needed to do something a little more physical and less emotional for a while.
This had led to his current job. And his favorite part of that job… was the math. I’m sure he’s told me five or six times during our conversations in the last couple of days, smiling despite himself each time, “I love numbers almost as much as I love people!”
Two mornings later, Zach and a co-worker were back bright and early to continue repairs. I threw on jeans and some flip-flops and ran out to tell them that the exterminator was due back at 8:00 and might be spraying from the exterior, which would mean that construction might be delayed a couple hours.
As we all stood around awaiting more information by phone, we got to talking once again. The other worker was a stocky, heavily bearded guy with his knit cap pulled low. Even wearing his dusty mechanic-blue jacket, tattoos were clearly visible, rivaling Zach’s. If not for his clothing, you could easily imagine him having been a Viking downing tankards of grog at some alehouse of yore. He flicked the ash off his cigarette and took another puff.
I introduced myself. His name is Doug. He shook my hand and the three of us chatted for a few minutes.
Zach and Doug then took off for a bit as the exterminator arrived and did his thing. Once they returned, Zach went into the bedroom to assess what needed to happen inside the closet. A few days earlier, based on our conversation, I’d given him a copy of my first book, The Best Advice So Far; and I’d just handed him a copy of the newly-released TRIED & (Still) TRUE. Doug was immediately curious. “You write books? Cool. What’s it about? Where can I get one?” As Zach continued with his tape measure, Doug and I got another chance to talk a bit.
Here again, one might make assumptions about the kinds of things “someone like Doug” might talk about in the few minutes standing with a stranger in a hallway while on a job. You’d likely be wrong.
I could immediately tell that Doug has a quick wit and sense of humor. Once we got to talking, he laughed often.
Doug also plays in a band. If you went only by his black “DOOM” T-shirt, depicting what looks like someone trying to pull demons out of hell, you probably wouldn’t guess that his primary instrument is upright bass or that his band, Cactus Attack, finds it tricky to schedule their tours on account of two of his other band mates being full-time teachers.
I handed Doug his own copies of the books. He read the backs, brows intent. “This is my favorite kind of book. I love philosophy. Thanks, man.” From there, Doug shared with me his observations about how people too often seem to be looking for differences between themselves and others rather than similarities. "I talk to people about this all the time,” he said. “You’ve got to slow down and make time to get to know people and their story before you make judgments. Even people who do things you might strongly disagree with usually have a reason that makes sense to them, and I think it’s valuable for us to be able to understand those reasons.” We talked about religious cults, terrorists and factions within modern feminism, with Doug passionately making the case for empathy and education at each turn.
Later, when the three of us were in the mix again talking, I suggested the word “malapropism” to describe a habit Zach said he sometimes falls into, at which point Doug interjected, “Actually, with you, Zach, it’s usually malaphors, not malapropisms.” This was interspersed with his thoughts on Socrates and Plato, peppered with other underused words such as pedagogy.
There was clearly much more to both of these great guys than might at first meet the eye.
Though I say this often, it’s worth repeating: names matter. By asking someone’s name and giving your own, you open doors of possibility. So often, if we aren’t careful, we can get to treating people as little more than background noise, obstacles to overcome or means to achieving an end. Names serve as a reminder that the other people all around us are just that—real people, with lives as full, interesting, meaningful and complex as our own.
In addition, while most of us would agree if asked that one should “never judge a book by its cover,” it takes intention and consistency to actually live it. And it’s been my observation that the standard most used in judging book covers is little more than “does that cover look enough like my own?” I’ll quote Doug here from our conversation: “What a boring and small life it is to surround yourself only with people who are exactly like you.”
To quote Bill Nye the Science Guy, “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” If we truly embrace this, the world and the people in it become an endless source of connection, fascinating stories, learning and growth.
My friend Chad often says, “Follow your natural curiosity.” I agree, 100%. However, I think so often anymore that we forget how to be curious. We leave it behind, somewhere back in the ether of childhood. As we get older, we allow that natural curiosity to be replaced with fear. Yet the more we give in to this, the smaller our worlds become.
In fact, if there were one takeaway here, it would be to rediscover your curiosity. And then follow it.
You’ll encounter new stories and change your own story in the process. Zach and Doug are two recent reminders of the benefits of doing this, here in my own little corner of the world. Now I encourage you to go find out who your own next surprise might be.
even though
I was talking with a friend recently. I’ll call him Ralph here. Ralph’s relationship with his brother has been on the outs of late, and he was trying to understand what had happened and what he might be able to do at this point to improve the relationship.
I asked a series of questions. This revealed that the rift had started when Ralph had voiced his stand (e.g., opinions, religious views, moral position and, dare I say, judgment) on some of his brother’s recent personal decisions.
I asked Ralph, “How do you think you’d handle it if you were in the mix with a flamboyant gay guy?”
At first, Ralph looked bewildered, like he thought I hadn’t heard him clearly or that I was having a flashback to my famed Amnesia Episode of 1999. But trusting that I usually have a point to my rabbit trails, he answered. “Well, a few years ago, I actually was in the mix with a flamboyant gay man that I needed to interact with at an annual event. And we got along great.” It was clear from the phrasing that this was one of very few such people Ralph had ever known, if not the sole example.
I continued, “So, would you say it would feel comfortable for you to use the words ‘even though’ in describing your relationship with that person? For instance, could you easily complete this sentence, ‘I liked the guy even though…’?”
Ralph straightened up, answering quickly and confidently. “Yes, absolutely. I feel comfortable saying that I liked him even though he was gay, flamboyant and married to a man.”
The slump to his shoulders told me that he wasn’t expecting what I said next.
“I thought that might be the case, Ralph. And that’s a problem.”
*****
I love words.
There’s an inherent power in words. The right word or phrasing used at the right time can earn a first date or seal the impossible business deal. Likewise, a word used carelessly or at the wrong time can start a war.
My curiosity is continually piqued by connotation: the implied meaning or feelings that become associated with a word or phrase over time among a particular group of people. One example I cite often is rocking chair. Here’s the dictionary listing:
rock·ing chair
/ˈräkiNG ˌCHe(ə)r /
noun
a chair mounted on rockers or springs, so as to rock back and forth
Nothing particularly earth-shattering for a native speaker to learn there.
However, answer the following questions to yourself:
- What is a rocking chair made of?
- What color is a rocking chair?
- Who sits in a rocking chair?
Cultural connotation all but guarantees that the majority of people will form an instant mental image paired with the following connotations:
- Rocking chairs are made of wood.
- Rocking chairs are brown or white.
- Elderly people (usually “grandmothers”) or young mothers sit in rocking chairs.
If you “saw” something different, it’s either because you yourself had or have a rocking chair that came to your mind—or because you are simply trying to be contrary.
However, there is nothing about the actual definition of rocking chair that in any way prohibits it from being plastic, being purple with green polka-dots, or being used by a teenaged boy.
Ignoring the connotations of language causes us to falter in our communication (or to choose willful deceit).
With this in mind, let’s dig a little deeper into that two-word transitional phrase that had my friend Ralph feeling so confused: “even though.”
*****
Looking up “even though” in a dictionary, here’s basically what you’ll find:
e·ven though
/ˈe ˌvən ˈTHō /
conj. phrase
despite the fact that
Not very helpful.
Here’s where diving a little deeper gets interesting. And please know…I realize that not everyone is a linguistic nerd like I am, so I’ll try not to get too crazy here.
At the most basic level, “even though” shows contrast. In this way, it fits into the family of meanings similar to “but” in logical flow.
Here’s the example sentence given by Merriam-Webster:
“She stayed with him even though he often mistreated her.”
We have two facts here:
- He often mistreated her.
- She stayed with him.
The phrase “even though” is used to join the two facts while adding a logical (or in this case illogical) connection.
What would be considered the parallel or expected or natural course of action resulting from “He often mistreated her”? I think most of us would consider it to be something along the lines of “She left him.”
By pairing the two facts with “even though,” we show a contrast between the actions of the two people—and, in fact, between the people themselves. We’re not concerned in this sentence with exploring why she acted as she did. But by using “even though,” we’ve essentially created opposites:
abuser / victim
too mean / too nice
As such, while it’s not expressly stated in the sentence, “even though” asserts the following strong implication:
She did not often mistreat him.
In other words, if the speaker of the sentence knew that the woman had also mistreated the man, to use “even though” would have been an intentional act of deceit aimed at making it seem that she had not.
Coming full circle, I’ll say it again: “even though” shows contrast.
Opposite qualities or expectations.
Yeah, so?
Well, let’s revisit Ralph’s reply to my probing question:
“Yes, absolutely. I feel comfortable saying that I liked him even though he was gay, flamboyant and married to a man.”
And here’s the diagnostic element. Since using “even though” felt comfortable to Ralph, he had set up a foundational separation between himself and the other man. In fact, he’d created logical opposites, not merely “differences.”
Make sure you grasp that. It’s key.
When we say (or think, or would feel comfortable saying or thinking)…
“I [nice / positive / right thing] even though that person ________________,”
…we’ve revealed that we believe whatever fills that blank is not nice / not positive / not right.
We are in short saying, “I am good but you are bad.”
Certainly, in some cases, that dichotomy is true and accurate:
“Nora loved her brother even though he had murdered a man.”
It would be good and kind and noble of Nora to continue to love her brother. And we would consider that her brother was, at least in this regard, not good or kind or noble.
Or consider this one:
“I love my kids even though they are messy.”
That’s terrific. But make no mistake: a contrast—an opposite comparison—is being made here. I am not messy (which, by implication, is the right way to be), so it’s mighty big of me to overlook the flaws of my kids. The use of “even though” casts me in a favorable light and, therefore, my kids in an ugly one.
The problem comes in when we deceive ourselves into thinking that our expressions of love or acceptance for someone “even though”… is somehow an indicator that we’ve become a beacon of true equality. In fact, it reveals quite the opposite about us.
So when someone who identifies as Christian says, “I get along fine with my neighbors, even though they are Muslim,” it’s really saying…
“I am right and good and so big a person that I can get along with those wrong and bad people.”
And when my friend Ralph expressed, “I liked him even though he was gay, flamboyant and married to a man,” he was really saying…
“I—being a straight person of reserved demeanor whose family is doing things the only correct and acceptable way—am by default the moral standard; and yet I'm such a good person that I found it within myself not to mention the flaws and wrongness of that other morally depraved person who really should change to be more like me.”
Still not convinced? Then please accept a challenge.
If you don’t think this type of comparison is being made when you have an “even-though” view of others—if your claim is that it does somehow reflect true equality and that I'm just nitpicking—try flipping your statements around so that you are on the other side of “even though”:
“My kids love me even though I…”
“The Muslim family next door gets along with me even though I…”
(And if you're a teen, or you are Muslim, put your parent or Christian neighbor first in those examples.)
When I asked Ralph to swap the order of his “even though,” here’s how he completed it:
“My flamboyantly gay associate liked me even though I…am a self-righteous and judgmental jerk.”
Kudos to you, Ralph. You’re on the road to enlightenment.
The fact is, “even though” statements feel bizarre where a mindset of true equality exists. Consider:
“We have been friends since childhood even though she has brown hair.”
Weird, right? But why? Well, the reason such a statement likely feels off to you is that, in your heart of hearts, you truly don’t care about hair color. You may notice it. You may even appreciate or admire it. But at the core of your being, where truth lies, hair color simply holds no connotations of right or wrong, good or evil. It just is.
True equality draws no lines. But neither does it draw attention.
True equality is invisible to itself. It forgets that it even exists.
“Even though” isn’t just about the words you happen to say aloud.
It’s an attitude, a mindset, a revelation of self.
"Even though" is a worldview.
And true equality finds little use for it.
choice: the wall
In my last post, I invited you to celebrate with me the successful completion of a yearlong writing goal I’d set for myself in 2017.
Since that post, I’ve allowed myself a break from all things blog. It was strategic. I knew that if I were to just continue on writing at the previously set “goal pace,” I would have felt locked into it rather than having been able, as I did, to have closure on that goal—and to then begin a new one.
Well, today is the day I begin that new goal where this blog is concerned.
As my focus turns toward writing the next book—currently entitled Tried and (Still) True—I want to be sure that I continue to give the concepts in The Best Advice So Far adequate development. They are, after all, timeless—just as true and life-changing now as they were at the start of things.
I imagine it’s much the same as having a second or third child: being sure, with all the time and attention that the new addition requires, to continue to love and foster and invest in the firstborn.
An idea coalesced during my short writing break: Why not revisit the advice in every chapter of The Best Advice So Far again, but from an as-yet-unexplored angle or with new stories?
As soon as the notion hit me, it just felt somehow right. Familiar and yet at the same time fresh and exciting. And so, for most if not all of 2018, that will be my new goal and focus. I’m not committing myself to stick stringently to plan, if something outside the express realm of the first book should happen along the way and burn to be told. But I believe it will make for a good guiding force.
*****
Sometime back in the early fall, I caught wind of a great deal on a three-day cruise out of Miami to the Bahamas. Little did I know at the time, when I booked a cabin for the MLK holiday weekend, that winter in New England would be plunging the region into weeks of sub-zero temperatures. During the worst of it, temperatures dropped to -19°F with wind chill affecting -35°F. Attempting such simple tasks as pumping gas (should one have run out of the house quickly without donning gloves) was not only painful but downright dangerous. And try as I might—whether by standing awkwardly with my toes tucked under the old-fashioned radiators in my home, or standing in the shower several times a day for no other reason than warming up—I was never quite able to thaw the blocks of ice that had replaced my feet.
So when the day finally came, I was beyond ready to walk barefoot on sun-warmed grass or sand, to squint with hand-shaded eyes at a too-bright sky—and to bask in the profligate luxury of feeling too hot.
As it turned out, the day I left for Florida, my own home area had a freakish warm streak approaching 60°, while Florida saw a relative cold spell, with one night dipping into the 40s. Still, their “chilly” was shorts-and-flip-flops weather for me.
The cruise was all I had hoped it would be, a real soul restorer. And yet, again, I was surprised by the abundance of generally bad behavior around me.
Before we even set sail, during the mandatory safety drills which required that all hands (and guests) be on deck, many people were disruptive and outright rude to the staff: crying out angrily in the middle of instructions that it was taking too long, or that they were bored, or that the (extremely patient) muster leaders were keeping them from the bar and drinks they had paid for.
I frequently passed people grumbling (to whom, I wondered) about the overcast sky.
Several cruisers with whom I tried to engage in friendly small talk while waiting in a line or on a transfer ferry (not, God forbid, keeping them from the bar or their drinks) were unnecessarily aloof—even dismissive.
Late one night, after a full day of fun on shore and a posh dinner in the formal dining room, I came up to the main deck and slid, smiling, into one of the large hot tubs. I asked the two other guests sharing the spa—a father and his college-aged daughter—how they were enjoying their cruise. They immediately began to complain:
…about the weather,
…about the “small” size of the (eleven-story) ship,
…about the “inferior quality” of the food.
Within fifteen minutes, able to tolerate it no longer, I politely extricated myself from the conversation in search of cheerier company.
Mind you, there were numerous dining options available at all times, each allowing all-you-can-eat access to, I dare say, several hundred varied and exquisitely prepared foods.
You’ll have to trust me when I say that I’m being generous to a fault as I describe the rude behavior of many aboard the ship. More than once, it was not only sad but uncomfortable, even for me.
*****
On Sunday morning, we docked in Nassau, Bahamas.
It’s not a beach sort of place. Rather, you exit the ship and are immediately greeted by a cacophony of urgent voices crying out from just beyond the iron fence:
“You! You! Taxi! Taxi!”
“City tour! Come now! I show you the best places only!”
“Beads! Necklaces! Good price, mon!”
Security guards usher cruise guests out of the melee and into a long, narrow—and carefully presented—strip of shopping options, where one can buy anything from Gucci watches and handbags to Vera Wang shoes at prices that hint at (if not outright tout) the use of slave labor.
Walking beyond the shops funnels the wayward invariably toward Queen’s Staircase.
The tall, steep set of stairs leads upward to—more shops on the periphery of what alleges to be the central attraction: Fort Fincastle.
For those who chose to look only as far as the wall or back toward the port, it’s idyllic:
But turn the other direction—to where the majority of the island lay beyond that wall—and the illusion quickly evaporates.
I stood on the barricade and hopped down a few feet to a square landing made of cracked concrete. From this perch, drifts of garbage became visible, piling up yards high against the wall. Peering through the nearest thicket of palms, I was able to just make out a shanty. A young woman slumped on the porch, watching a naked child and a chicken totter about in the dirt. A rope drooped low to the ground, laden with a few articles of clothing hung out to air.
I had no interest in the veneer that had been set up for tourists. I wanted to know the real people of the island. So it was that my travel companion and I decided to venture over the wall and into the real Bahamas.
I can only describe the change as immediate and stark.
Whereas shops along the main drag by the port bustled with the day’s visitors, every building that appeared to have at one time been a place of business was dilapidated, defaced, boarded up. Closed.
It appeared at first that the other structures were abandoned as well. Crumbling walls. Trees through roofs. Bushes and tall grass growing up through rusted jalopies. Here or there, a scrawny chicken scratched at the dust. Feral cats rubbed skeletal ribs along graffiti-covered walls.
Where were the people?
A little further in and there began to be signs of life—voices of beauty heard and strong spirits felt, before their owners ever came into view.
Then, at long last, they emerged: the real people of the island.
A thin man with dreadlocks plodded off course and toward us on unsteady feet. It was the first islander to make contact, and we were in another country, outside the bounds deemed “safe” for travelers. What did he want?
When he reached us, he grinned warmly and offered an outstretched fist for a “bump.” We bumped.
::bump bump::
“Welcome to Bahamas, mon! Have a nice day!” he bellowed. We wished him the same and off he went to continue his trek.
A brightly dressed woman and child were next. My guess was that they were on their way to church. Again, they smiled and welcomed us to their island.
A young man waved from a doorway across the street.
Further in we went.
Before long, a police car pulled up alongside us. The window rolled down. The officer smiled. “You came from port?” We confirmed that, yes, we had. The officer continued, “I would suggest you turn back soon. This is a high crime area. Not safe, you know.” We thanked him for the information and on he drove.
Not wishing to tempt fate, we turned down a parallel side street.
We met Kenneth, who told us much about the recent political race in the Bahamas and about his love of American football.
The next street was blocked off with makeshift barricades, as broken pavement gave way to packed dirt and mud. Side-stepping deep puddles, we continued down the road anyway.
A few more strides brought us upon two elderly ladies with shorn heads and dressed in their night clothes, chatting with one another in the middle of the street. No sooner did they spy us than their faces cracked with beaming smiles with many missing teeth. “Hallo!” they cried, one of them reaching her hands out to take ours. “Welcome to Bahamas! A lovely day!” And we felt welcome.
We told them that we’d happened upon their little street when the police had warned us to turn back. “Bah!” cried the first woman, who introduced herself as Shari. “Bah!”
Her friend waved a dismissive hand. “The news lady, she tells the world that we are criminals” (this last bit sounding like creamy-nose). “She say that we are bad people. But we are not bad people.”
The first joined in again, addressing us with emphatic voice and large gestures. “You walk far, yes?”
“Yes, quite a ways,” we agreed.
“And did anyone harm you?”
We shook our heads, smiling.
“Did anyone rob you? Ask you for money or something? Are we robbing you now?”
“No, not at all,” we concurred. “Everyone has been very friendly and kind, including you both.”
“Yes! You see then. We are not criminals, bad people. We are nice people. We don’t care who comes here, what color is their skin or nothing. We just want people to be happy!” Shari’s raspy voice pealed, her final word stretched triple length:
Haaaaah-peeeee!
We all laughed aloud together as she continued to grip our hands as if she were our own grandmother.
“And look around you. Is this so terrible? This is a nice neighborhood we have! You see it with your own eyes, yes?”
We surveyed our surroundings once more. You would never see such poverty and unfit living conditions even in the worst of places in the United States.
“It’s a beautiful place with nice people and good neighbors like yourselves living here. Thank you for welcoming us and being so kind to us, even though we’re visitors.”
“Bah!” Shari cried again, beaming. “There are no strangers here. Only friends!”
I promised them that I would tell you all about them, their kindness and their beautiful island. And though they’ll never know it, I’m making good on that promise.
*****
Now, how is it that those with enough leisure time and excess money to take a luxury cruise with bountiful cuisine and endless entertainment—those who have everything—can find endless reasons for rudeness, disappointment and griping…
…while those who are among the poorest of the poor—those who have nothing—can live as though they have everything, exclaiming that their lives are filled with beauty and that everyone is their friend?
“You always have a choice.”
Therein lies the wall.
fear: two
The previous post wound up being a sort of flight of ideas on fear. I had no intention of taking it further than that when I hit “Publish” last week. But the theme of fear has continued to rear its … well … rather common head in the time since then. So it seems worthwhile to take another walk on the dark side.
*****
I wound up getting to the gym quite late last night — 4:15AM to be exact. (Yes, that was late, not early, considering my usual arrival is between midnight and 2:00.) As you might imagine, the place was pretty empty. Other than myself, there were only two people working out.
One of them was a woman. We were busy at opposite ends of the gym, but I noticed her. She was quite thin, perhaps in her mid to late fifties. Her gait was unsteady, hinting at a neuromuscular disease. And she was tearing the place up (in the best of ways). She moved non-stop between machines, taking only minimal breaks between sets before she was back at it.
By the time I moved that way to use the cables, she was on the mats doing bicycles (an ab workout) for durations that would make me cry. I thought about wandering over, introducing myself and telling her that she was putting me to shame. But she was wearing headphones; and so I kept my admiration to myself for the time being.
We both finished up about the same time. The sky was still black with just a hint of cobalt on the horizon as I headed out to the parking lot, only a few yards behind the woman. I walked a bit faster, thinking now might be a good time to introduce myself. Perhaps hearing my footsteps on the pavement, she cast a wide-eyed glance over her shoulder and then turned abruptly, quickening her own pace.
I decided to let the moment pass, heading for my car instead. By the time I got my things inside and was finally situated, the woman was in her own vehicle and slowly rounding the corner in front of me. Just then, she hit the Caution: Pedestrians crosswalk sign. There was a * thunk * as the plastic yellow tower tipped to the side and scraped along her rear fender before righting itself. She stopped, her face worried. She craned around backward but still couldn’t see what she’d hit.
I knew that getting out of the car and back in would be no mean feat for her. So I hopped out to tell her there was nothing to worry about, that there was no damage to the sign or her car. Our eyes met in her rearview mirror. Her brow furrowed more deeply, so I smiled and waved, moving toward the side of her car where she might be able to see me more clearly.
She gunned the gas, tires chirping, and hightailed it out of there.
As I stood there holding my good intentions, it felt odd to consider that anyone would see me as a threat — that I could ever strike fear into someone.
On the drive home, an interesting thought occurred to me. I wasn’t offended at the revelation. In fact, it made sense when I put myself into the woman’s shoes. But all the same, there it was, as plain as day…
I’d been stereotyped.
That is to say, muscled guys who approach woman after dark are up to no good.
In Logic, this belief is what’s called a universal categorical proposition. Here’s the For-Dummies version:
It’s all or nothing.
All muscled guys who approach women after dark have ill intent.
No muscled guys who approach women after dark have good intentions.
*****
Some parental axioms never seem to go out of style:
If you keep making that face, it’ll freeze that way.
As long as you live under my roof, you’ll abide by my rules.
Nothing good ever happens after midnight.
In the case of the latter, we find another all-or-nothing belief that’s somehow embedded itself into society. And yet when I subject this statement to even the most rudimentary of consideration, it falls apart pretty quickly.
As I mentioned, I work out after midnight, and that seems pretty good. Some of the best conversations I remember from across a lifetime have happened after midnight. Nearly every good song of mine was written after midnight. In fact, it’s fair to say that virtually all of my book The Best Advice So Far was also written after midnight. I’ve walked on the beach, planned surprise parties and dropped off items for charity all after midnight.
And yet, consider…
The terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Boston Marathon bombing. The recent Las Vegas killing spree, NYC rush-hour incident and Texas church massacre. Every school shooting. They all happened before midnight.
So, if they aren’t true, where do universal categorizations like “Nothing good ever happens after midnight” come from? How do they start? And why do they persist?
I’d like to proffer that the underlying cause of such unfounded beliefs and negative stereotypes is the same.
Fear.
Moreover, unpredictability appears to be a major ingredient in fear. You see, if something is unpredictable, then I can’t control it. And I need to feel like I’m in control. So I begin placing people and situations into black-and-white categories that at least allow me the illusion of predictability and control.
I cannot allow for “some” to exist outside the bounds of my categories, or even that “most” exist within them, because either would reintroduce that dreaded unpredictability.
And so, rather than face that uncertainty in life, we adhere strictly to “All” or “None.” It’s just easier that way.
If I can convince myself and others to buy into my system, I can be at peace again. So I tell my teens that “Nothing good ever happens after midnight,” because it feels like I now have a definitive line in the sand that will allow me to protect them and not to worry. As long as they are in before the carriage turns back into a pumpkin, nothing bad will ever happen to them. I can sleep. It’s simple.
It’s not true, mind you. But it’s simple.
*****
I mentioned Logic earlier in the post. It's probably on my mind more than usual because I’m helping a young friend of mine get through his college Logic class this semester.
The field of Logic is funny. It’s clearly stated that whether a premise is true or false is irrelevant. All that matters is the form of the argument. That is to say, if my premises were all true, and if that would make it impossible that my conclusion were false, then my argument is valid.
As such, the following is considered a valid argument by the rules of Logic:
All bankers are swindlers.
All swindlers are aliens.
Therefore, all bankers are aliens.
Oddly enough, if the premises contradict one another, the argument is considered valid by virtue of the loophole that since it’s impossible for me to make all the premises true, I can’t rule out that the conclusion might be true:
All dogs are pigs.
Some dogs are not pigs.
Therefore, dogs are human.
Yup, that’s considered a valid argument.
Before you label it all crazy talk, consider how often we take this approach when we construct our arguments about people and situations in real life.
Nothing good happens after midnight.
It is after midnight.
Therefore, whatever is happening is not good.
Or…
All muscled guys who approach women after dark are dangerous.
A muscled guy is approaching me, a woman, after dark.
Therefore, the guy is dangerous.
Likewise…
All white people, including police officers, are prejudiced against people of color.
All black people are lazy, out to steal jobs without hard work or merit.
All [Democrates/Republicans] are stupid.
All Muslims are radicals plotting to harm Americans.
All gay men are pedophiles.
All highly attractive people are shallow and self-absorbed.
None of this is true, of course. Not even close. But it’s simple.
And so, like those logicians, we convince ourselves that truth is irrelevant, as long as our premises validate the conclusion that will keep our sense of control intact.
You see, if I label it and categorize it, I can avoid it. I can stay on this side of the boundary, with them all on the other side. And I can feel safe. Protected. Justified. I can control it.
Please note, however, that Logic does go on to differentiate between arguments that are merely valid and those that are sound. That is, in order to be considered sound, an argument must both be valid and actually have true premises.
Well, given this new insight, none of the arguments above is sound.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had “vibes” about certain people or situations, a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Often, I’ve trusted that hunch. And though I’ll never really know whether it was accurate, I do support trusting your gut — if and only if you’re sure that there are no underlying stereotypes already in place before such an encounter, ideas stemming from categorical fear or lack of understanding.
I guess what I’m inviting each of us to do today is to consider where we might be building walls that keep out people or opportunities in our life, and then to ask ourselves whether the arguments we make in defense of those walls are rooted in fear — or in truth.
For some real-life stories of stereotype-smashing encounters, check out the following posts:
eating my words
I was in a hurry. I had company coming any minute and realized that I was out of a few things. So I dashed out to the closest grocery store, had the car door open before I’d even turned off the ignition, and made a beeline for the entrance.
However, once I’d traversed the crosswalk and arrived at the outdoor gourd display, I was stopped short by an elderly couple who shuffled, a quarter-step at a time, toward the automatic door, which opened, then closed, then opened …
The man seemed to be the root of the hold-up. His back was hunched, his head stooped and shaking, as he leaned heavily on a quad cane in his left hand while his wife supported him on the other side. Once they’d gotten through the first door, they doddered a few more laborious steps and the woman headed right to retrieve a shopping cart — leaving her husband in just about the only spot that could have completely blocked the second door.
A backup was now forming, others patrons unable to circumvent the painfully slow couple to get inside.
I sighed in irritation, feeling a pressure build behind my eyes. Why now of all times? I need to get my things and get home.
The man was too close to the door — which continued to open, close, open, close — for his wife to get the carriage around him. She let go of it, assisted him in stepping sideways a few times, then pushed the cart through the door … where she left it to block the inside of the doorway while she returned once more to aid her husband.
I saw my opening. I quickly maneuvered behind and around the old man. Yet even on tiptoes and sucking in my breath, I wound up knocking his left elbow as I passed. I slipped to the front of them and through the doorway, where I moved the cart forward a few inches to scoot around it and on my way.
Eating my words 1
A minute later, somewhere toward the back of the produce section, I heard a voice:
“Treat people as people, not as props or obstacles in your path.”
“Focus on the person, not the problem.”
“Patience is still a virtue.”
In case you don’t recognize it, the voice I heard was my own, reminding me of things I’ve written about often on this blog and within the pages of my first book, The Best Advice So Far.
I stopped.
I thought about my 93-year-old Nana, and how glad I’d be if she could manage — however slow her pace — to still get out and enjoy doing her own grocery shopping. I thought about how I’d feel if I saw some impatient, inconsiderate, self-absorbed jerk darting around her, jostling her on his way to get about his own business.
Grade-A Heel.
Eating my words 2
I don’t very much like that picture of myself; and, as a rule, it’s not who I am. What I do like very much, however, is that I have that voice speaking in my head, loud and clear.
In my role as a mentor, writer and speaker, people often thank me for the advice I share, expressing how it’s helped them solve a problem, change their perspective or approach people differently. But as I replied to one reader-friend in the comments section of a recent post:
“Trust me — I am my own reader in the sense of thinking about these things. I honestly believe that I benefit most from writing what I write. It keeps me honest. Hard to write and speak things and then ignore them.”
I went looking for the old couple, to apologize. I looked down every aisle. Oddly enough, they were nowhere to be found. I was sad about that. Still, I’d gotten yet another timely reminder about people, myself and the things that really matter in life all the same.
I took a break in the middle of publishing this post, deciding to go for a short walk to enjoy the unseasonably warm day and the fall foliage along a lakeside trail nearby. No sooner had I begun, it seemed, I came upon a woman and her old dog. The woman walked with a cane, the dog plodding along beside her. They were making their way by inches across a wooden bridge — no way around them. But you can bet that my patience, empathy and ability to see people as people had returned. I stooped to pet her friend while she and I enjoyed some light conversation as she continued to cross the bridge at her own pace. How wonderful, I thought, that despite her obvious challenges, she was making the choice to go out — and live.
Eating my words 3
None of us gets it right every time in life. But I can tell you first hand that you’ll get it right a lot more often, right your course more quickly, when you’ve got a stream of consistent and positive messages flowing in.
I’m not talking about the glut of motivational memes scrolling up our feeds between celebrity gossip and weird pet tricks. I’m talking about selective input to which we devote regular time and focus.
It's a slow and steady diet. There are no quick fixes or overnight successes. And none of us ever arrives.
Whether for you or for me, a lifestyle of positivity requires being intentional. It doesn’t happen by accident.
As with most things, it comes down to choice.
umbrella
Singin’ in the Rain just may be my favorite movie of all time.
I watch the film at least once a year, and I reference lines or scenes from it often. It still gives me the same feeling it did the very first time I saw it. I laugh just as hard. My eyes still get wide at some of the dance numbers. And, of course, I sing along through the whole thing.
I dare you to watch it and not at least smile.
In Gene Kelly’s big number, his character, Don Lockwood, is feeling giddy with new love; and so, despite the torrential rain, he waves his driver on and walks home, using his umbrella as a dance prop rather than as any sort of protection. Soaked and smiling broadly as the scene ends, he hands his umbrella off to a shrug-shouldered and miserable-looking man passing the other direction.
Between gorgeous sunny streaks, we’ve also had our share of heavy rain here in Florida, where I’m spending the month of August. In fact, within my first 24 hours here, I was caught driving in the most blinding storm I can recall — the sky, road and crushing downpour all blending into one continuous sheet of gray.
And I hadn’t brought an umbrella.
Thing is, I could easily have bought one. But — call me crazy — I just figured, why bother? So I get a little wet. I’m getting wet in the ocean and pools and hot tubs anyway, right?
During one such storm, I ventured out to get a few things at the nearby grocery store. I hadn’t quite stopped dripping by the time I got in line at the register. Yet there in front of me, right in the store, an even bigger storm was brewing, lashing out at everyone nearby.
Being quite late at night, there were only two check-out lanes open: a standard lane and a 10-items-or-less lane. I was in the latter. A family of four was currently being rung and occupied the short space between the cashier and the bagging station.
The middle-aged woman between that family and me was in full rage, shouting loudly, throwing her hands this way and that to further emphasize her tirade:
“Yeah, I know you saw the g*#d@* sign! Don’t pretend that you don’t speak #$%&* English either! Yeah, you speak English plenty fine when you want something, don’t you. 10 ITEMS OR LESS! What, you need @$&*% help counting to 10? Lemme help you! ONE … TWO … THREE …
She jabbed a rigid finger at remaining items on the belt with each count.
The screaming woman continued:
“… NINE … TEN! That’s right! Not 12! Not 15! Not @#$&* whatever you want! You @#$&* IMMIGRANTS come over here thinking you can do whatever the @#&% you want, while the people who LIVE HERE are supposed to just sit back and take it! Go back to wherever you came from! Maybe they’ll teach you how to COUNT!”
The family stood there red-faced. The children looked visibly shaken, cowering away from the outburst and pressing half-faces into their parents.
The belligerent woman didn’t let up. Next, she lit into the mortified cashier, a woman of about 70:
“You should’ve told them to go to the end of the other line! It’s people like you who let these @#$&*% people walk all over us! Any other store, you’d be fired for no following the rules and making them leave! I’ve been standing here all night with my five items — yeah, that’s right,” she turned to the family again, “five! Not @#$%& FIFTY! G$*d#* IMMIGRANTS!”
Now, in my estimation, the family had approximately 20 items. And “standing here all night” was approximately two minutes.
Throughout this, I was not more than three feet behind this woman, watching all of this. Many things crossed my mind. I wondered if I should intervene, say something, defend the family or the cashier. I was embarrassed at the behavior of someone who was treating others this way in the name of “America.” I wanted to somehow let the attacked family know that this woman didn’t represent most people. But something told me that engaging with her would only have prolonged the episode for all involved.
The cashier, Joan, kept her attention squarely on the family, somehow managing to ignore the invective that was underway. In what was surely her best effort to make the family feel welcomed and safe, she smiled encouragingly and apologetically at them, moving their remaining items through as quickly as possible. Payment complete, she bid them “Have a nice day” as they grabbed their few bags and made a bee-line for the door without looking back.
Joan took a slow, deep breath, then began to ring the items of the irate customer. With her best attempt at cheer, asked the woman, “Did you find everything you needed today?”
The woman was still proclaiming her outrage, “You should’ve made them move. It’s not fair that you make everyone else wait …”
Joan spoke in a light tone, “I understand how frustrating that must be. We don’t always see into the cart to know exactly how many items someone has until after we’ve begun ringing. I’ll be sure to keep an extra careful eye out next time.”
Despite Joan’s choice to exercise humility and even bear the burden of fault (instead of immediately having called for management or security, which would have been the reasonable choice), the angry woman continued to murmur her complaints until her order was completed and she stormed out.
Though the entire ordeal had lasted only minutes, Joan looked pale and harried. The storm had taken its toll. Still, she gave me the brightest smile she could manage. “How are you tonight, sir?”
I put my hand on the conveyor belt to stop its movement. I caught Joan’s eyes and smiled. I don’t believe I could have turned the tide with the previous woman’s diatribe. But this was a moment I could make the choice to do something about.
“Joan, that was an awful situation. I’m sorry you got caught in the middle of that. I can’t believe how well you handled it, focusing your attention on that family and making them feel like valued customers, and then treating that angry person with respect and dignity as well. Not many people could have held up with grace if faced with the same thing. Good job.”
Joan’s small smile broadened and her eyes moistened in true appreciation (and, I hope, pride).
I took my hand off the conveyor and she began scanning my few items.
Blip. Blip. Blip.
“I’d also like to speak to your manager," I added, "to let them know how impressed I am with you, Joan.”
Joan looked around as if she were being filmed by news crews and cameras were flashing her way. She clearly was not accustomed to compliments.
The attendant at the nearby customer-service desk, who’d been watching the whole thing, spoke up: “I’ll call a manager right now for you.”
Joan finished ringing my items and, as I paid, thanked me profusely for my kindness. Meanwhile, the manager had arrived. I stepped out of the lane so Joan could ring the next customer, but spoke loudly enough so that she could hear me. I told the manager about the incident and how extraordinarily Joan had dealt with all involved.
A smile crept across the manager’s face and he spoke even more loudly than I had. “Great job, Joan! I’m buying you lunch tomorrow!” Then to me but just as loudly, “Joan is one of my very best employees.”
A small round of applause broke out, led by another cashier but including all nearby workers and even customers.
Joan blushed, grinning broadly.
On my way out, I caught her eye one more time and smiled affectionately.
As the exit doors slid open, I felt just as I imagine Gene Kelly had giving away his umbrella — then singing and dancing out into the rain.
un-dumb frog
With age comes wisdom,
but sometimes age comes alone.
~ Oscar Wilde
As I start this post, there are just a few more hours left until my birthday.
Birthdays for me are still a time of celebration. They are also a time of reflection:
Where have I been?
What have I done?
Where am I going?
This time around the sun, I find myself thinking about the life advice that’s been passed along to me and that I have, in turn, passed along to others over the years. It’s an ongoing process. Sifting. Sorting. Testing. Honing. Much has been discarded. What I’ve kept has become all the more precious.
From books to broadcasts, seminars to sermons, political missives to posted memes — everyone seems to have “truer truth” than everyone else. I can’t help but wonder, amid the onslaught of voices, why anyone should be inclined to listen to mine. How’s anyone to know what to believe when it comes to advice?
What is factual — and what’s no more than loudly proclaimed opinion?
Somehow, all of these thoughts coalesced into a scene from my childhood. Or rather, I should say scenes from my childhood and adolescence; some tend to blur together on account of their repetitious nature.
There I am, sitting in a church pew. The side pieces are white, trimmed with dark-stained, ornate armrests. The back side of the pew in front of me is the same near-black wood, and at intervals along its length are matching outcrops that hold hymnals with gold foil lettering and faded maroon covers made of cloth that makes a zzzip! sound when I run my fingernails lightly over them.
Oscillating block chords emanate from the organ, reverberating from high ceilings, only to be pulled back down into the pits of stomachs by the weight of pulsing bass tones played on long, black foot pedals.
As the last echoes retreat, a suited man with slick hair solemnly ascends crimson-carpeted stairs and stands before a ponderous, stark white pulpit that matches the end-caps on the pews. As hymnals thud back into their places, the pastor’s eyes dart to parishioners, cowing any last whisperers into awkward silence, until he is sure he has everyone’s full attention.
His speech is slow, measured, punctuated with pregnant pauses. Authoritative. He knows what others do not — could not — know, mysteries that the masses would have no hope of understanding unless by his impartation.
He begins with an object lesson, as a principal might to abashed school children who had played hooky. He tells us that a frog placed into boiling water will jump out; but a frog placed into a pot of cool water that is heated slowly, degree by degree, will sit motionless, unaware, until the water reaches a boil and it cooks to death.
You can almost hear the collective gulp from the congregation.
The exemplum, in this case, clearly implies that we (the listeners, not by any means the speaker) are the frog and that, without the minister’s continual guidance and teaching, we too would acclimate to the incremental moral degradation around us until … well, until something nondescript but unspeakably terrible happened to us.
It’s funny. I was in this system for a long time. And I was considered the golden child, the model for others to follow. And yet I never quite understood the frog story.
I remember wondering, even at a very young age, what kind of sadistic person would have actually tested this out, slowly boiling frogs. And why?
I knew a lot about animals. More than many adults. In fact, my close second choice for schooling and career was marine biology. And I thought, This doesn’t make sense. Yes, a frog is cold blooded and will adapt; but it also has a survival instinct. I just can’t see it sitting in that water long enough to boil.
Now, if you were to Google “boiling frog” at this moment, you would find nearly a quarter of a million matches. This baby has been around a long time, a perennial favorite it seems. You can find a host of illustrations. You can even watch YouTube videos, as I did this morning, that seem to show the sequence of events — a live frog sitting in a pot of water with a digital thermometer attached to the side, showing a starting temperature of under 70° which slowly rises while the frog sits motionless, culminating in the gruesome sight of the dead frog floating amid the froth of a full boil.
But then the video ends with a note saying, “No animals were harmed during the making of this video.”
Things that make you go hmmmm.
The fact is that the maker of this video started with a premise that the old canard was true.
Yes, he had a real frog.
Yes, the frog was filmed in a pot of water.
And, yes, that water was heated from 70° to an on-screen temperature of about 81°.
But then … there is a cut away. We don’t see the temperature rising. We go straight to full boil as the man continues delivering his warning in sagacious tones.
Clearly, the frog in the boiling water is not the same one from the start of the video.
It’s a rubber frog.
Don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t some outcry against any particular religion. I just happened to have first heard the analogy in church growing up; but it’s been used by everyone from pastors to professors to politicians, as a means of adding weight to their own words.
That said, I encourage you to look up Friedrich Goltz. For now, so that I can tie things together, I’ll give you the nuts and bolts. Goltz was a German physiologist around the time of Lincoln. And in an effort to support a ruling theory that the seat of the human soul was the brain, Goltz conducted experiments in which he placed live frogs into cool water and slowly increased the temperature. And it is true that his frogs sat right there, seemingly oblivious to the rising heat, until they boiled to death.
Thing is, these were no ordinary frogs.
They were lobotomized.
Yup, that’s right. Goltz went to the trouble of removing the entire cerebral cortex of each frog in his study, essentially leaving only the stem attached to the spine. So while the frogs were technically “alive” in that their basic body functions continued, they had no brains.
Interestingly, they don’t tell you that part in the sermons.
The truth of the matter (as you'll find HERE and many other places) is that a frog thrown into boiling water will not “hop out.” When you think about it, it’s a ridiculous premise. Rather, the frog will likely die or, at the very least, be severely injured. And a frog subjected to incrementally heated water …
… will hop out. In fact, the test group in Goltz’s own original study — frogs with fully functional brains — all hopped out when things got uncomfortable.
You see, given a brain, even a frog knows when something seems fishy. It doesn’t just keep sitting there and taking it with a smile. In frog-language, it thinks, “Something’s not right here. I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense and I’m not putting up with it anymore. I’m outta here.”
Bear with me. I assure you that the dawn of another birthday is not bringing with it senility. I have a point in all of this.
As a matter of fact, here it is:
Just because a thing is said repeatedly or loudly … doesn’t make it true.
In actuality, even what I’m telling you right now may be a complete fabrication. Do you trust me? If so, why? At what point do we begin investing the time to find out for ourselves what is true —and what is not — over solely taking others' word for it?
Turns out frogs aren’t as dumb as they’d been made out to be after all.
The question is … what about us?
superstition
It was Thursday, well past the witching hour. I was on my way to the gym, the silent back roads lit only by the cold white light of an occasional street lamp. As I approached an intersection, something darker than the surrounding night dashed out from the woods in front of my car, stopping just long enough to fix bright green eyes on me before continuing into the thick brush on the other side.
A black cat.
And it had crossed my path.
Of course, being a rational person, this didn’t cause me to turn back the way I’d come and find an alternate route. Yet I was clearly still aware of the superstition associated with the incident. And it occurred to me that this awareness did have a subtle effect on my emotions. I drove onward as I normally would have; but some part of me felt I was doing so despite the superstition. And that would seem to indicate that the superstition had credence, if only in a residual way.
In other words, it seems to me that we don’t do things despite other things, unless those other things are perceived to hold some power or sway.
We wouldn’t say, “We had the picnic despite the forecast” — unless we perceived that the forecast had at least the potential to disrupt our plans.
Back to the example of the black cat crossing our path, it’s almost as if some small part of us feels we’ve accepted a dare, and that by crossing that path, we’re somehow giving the proverbial finger to the universe, proving we’re not one to be controlled by such nonsense.
No one could deny that we don’t have the same reaction when, say, a squirrel or turkey crosses our path. It wouldn’t even occur to us to think such a thing. Why? Because, well … we really don’t believe squirrels or turkeys crossing our path makes a lick of difference.
I guess what I’m saying is that all of us are affected to some degree — maybe even more than we might be aware — by voices from our past.
Culture. Society. Family. Religion. Media.
And no matter how reasonable we might be, we never entirely shake those influences.
Another example: in the last two weeks, I’m fairly certain I’ve heard at least three grown adults whom I consider to be intelligent, rational people relay to me with grim acceptance, “Well, you know what they say … bad things happen in threes.”
Even I myself, in that same stretch of time, had my wallet stolen and bank card charged up. Last night, on my way to see a movie, I got yet another call from the fraud department of a card that has never left my possession, telling me that someone in Florida had racked up nearly $1000 on the card, and had even gone so far as to access my account and change my address, mother’s maiden name and other details. And just before I sat down to start writing this post, my check-engine light came on for the first time since I’ve owned this car.
One.
Two.
Three.
Now, if pressed on the issue, most of us wouldn't voice support for the idea that a superstition like “bad things happen in threes” is rational. Who or what would be in charge of managing such a “rule”? And why?
And yet, if we’re honest, here again, we have to admit that a teeny tiny part of our emotional self has heard the words so many times that we wind up “shrugging off” such things: which can only mean that we’d felt they had climbed on, somehow, in the first place.
So where am I going with all of this discussion on superstition?
Well, it also occurred to me that black cats and other bad luck aren’t the only “collective voices” we’re in the continual process of needing to “shrug off.”
I was talking with a young man earlier this week. During our discussion, he made claims about himself that included such things:
- “I’m terrible with details.”
- “I forget everything.”
- “I guess I'm just dumb.”
And at different points, after listening to him talk, I’d challenge him:
- “You just told me that you read and compare medical reports on natural remedies and supplements. So are you really terrible with details?”
- “You don’t forget to come to work. Ever. And you’re good at your job, even though you haven’t been there long. So do you really forget everything?”
- “Every time I see you, you’re reading a new philosophy book or telling me your thoughts on comparative religion. Dumb people don’t do that. So why do you say you are ‘dumb’?”
In each instance, he’d pause and then backpedal a bit. But only in a qualifying sense: “Well, I don’t forget that” or “Well, I’m not dumb in that area, but …”
And the deeper I dug, the more I realized that each erroneous belief was rooted in collective voices from his past, things he’d heard or believed residually for so long that they felt true and powerful to him, even in the face of logical evidence to the contrary.
In other words, it seemed to me that he had certain superstitions about himself — that he was in a constant state of imbalance, trying to scramble around darting black cats that were shadow puppets of others’ making.
Perhaps you’ve made the leap with me so far, from “silly” cultural superstitions to personal ones. You’ve been willing to accept that maybe you’ve been hard on yourself in some areas that, if you take a close look at them, are just plain malarkey.
Don’t get too comfortable just yet.
Is it possible that, whether wittingly or unwittingly, you yourself are letting loose some black cats into other people’s pathways?
Take prejudice, for example. Surely, you don't consider yourself prejudiced, do you? I'm going to suggest that there may yet be superstitions lurking within your inner self where others are concerned.
For instance, might even a seemingly reasonable self-statement such as “I’m not prejudiced against [_______]” hold similarities to continuing to drive “despite” the black cat?
Put another way, I wonder if such claims may be more akin to “I’m open-minded and evolved enough to accept other people even though they are black / Latino / gay / Muslim / poor (i.e., “not like me,” who is the assumed standard of normal).”
I accept people even though.
Despite.
I guess what I’m suggesting is that the mere acknowledgement of such categorizations is evidence that socialization has in fact accounted for some of our thinking. [Even the labels I myself chose to include identify thinking associated with a particular assumed readership.] Ergo, some of that thinking — may be flawed and thus in need of adjustment.
Small children, when they accept another child, don’t think in terms of “I like them even though …” If you were to ask them to tell you why they accept someone else, they’d respond with something like, “Um … because they’re nice” or they’d roll their shoulder and say, “I dunno” and go skipping off.
No matter how old, how educated, how enlightened any of us may consider ourselves (or may actually even be, in relative terms) we’ve all got faulty beliefs. It’s part of being human, of living in a world with other humans. We influence — and we are influenced.
It seems to me that real wisdom isn’t reaching some pinnacle of perfection, but rather being honest enough to continually assess our ideas. To never become so attached to a mindset that we can no longer admit where we might have been wrong — and to let go. To adapt. To grow.
To change.
creative love
Due to an unexpected turn of events this week (a stolen wallet, fraudulent charges to my bank card and all that goes along with getting your life back to normal afterward — a topic about which I may write in more detail at a later time), I'm still not quite over the finish line where the audiobook release of The Best Advice So Far is concerned.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share one more audio chapter — Chapter 14: “Creative Love.”
This chapter has remained one of the most popular and most talked about chapters of the book. What's more, the chapter combines memories from 4th-of-July celebrations both recent and long past. So in honor of Independence Day, Tuesday here in the U.S., I thought sharing this chapter would be apropros.
Click the link below to listen to the official audiobook recording of Chapter 14: “Creative Love” (the full chapter text is below, if you'd like to follow along):
CHAPTER 14
CREATIVE LOVE
A year has passed since I got caught in that 4th-of-July traffic jam I told you about in the chapter on choosing positivity. Last night, I joined the best people for food and fireworks by the ocean. Unlike many towns, this one has taken to allowing private citizens to light their own fireworks along the shoreline. Not sparklers and bottle rockets, mind you. Real, honest-to-goodness fireworks. And lots of them.
Of course, this is all off the books. Fire and police officials “happen” to be very busy in remote parts of town at those hours, it seems — ::wink wink:: — but let's just keep that between ourselves, shall we?
As our little clan made our way along the sidewalks, the town was out in force. Patriotic music played strong and clear as we passed one yard, then seemed to garble like the tuning of a short-wave radio as we walked, only to gradually form itself into another solid tune as we approached the next yard — all accompanied by much boisterous and bad singing. Dogs strained at leashes, barking wildly at the cacophony. Children clustered together on quilts and blankets, bedecked with glowing bracelets and necklaces and halos, all wide-eyed and slack-jawed as they beheld the wonders in the sky.
The sea wall was packed, layers deep. No one seemed to mind. But I navigated my way through the crowd and down the concrete steps, then jumped from the wall to enjoy the spectacle from the rocky beach below. The nearest firework bundles and boxes were a mere twenty feet away from where I sat. Should be exciting.
The colors and assortment were dazzling, all fired quite low and seemingly right overhead. But what struck me most was the magnitude of sound. Whizzing. Screeching. Whirring. BOOMing. It was the loudest I could recall.
Ever.
At one point, it became overpowering. The sound — not the light — was actually hurting my eyes. So I closed them for a moment, placing my hands over them and pressing firmly with my fingertips. That's when the flashback hit.
Ricky.
It was the summer I had graduated from high school. I'd gotten a job at a school for the blind, and I had three “boys” assigned to my care, all of them in for a short-term summer program. In truth, they were each older than I was.
Ricky was 18. Aside from being blind, Ricky had pronounced Asperger's Syndrome. This was also accompanied by a form of echolalia. That is, Ricky's tendency was to copy or rephrase what other people said, rather than forming responses with any real personal meaning. So, if one asked Ricky, “Are you having a good day?” he might reply “I'm having a good day” — whether he was having a particularly good day or not.
Ricky was the best. Though he was a year older than I was, he had the affect and voice of a sweet-tempered six-year-old. I was fascinated, but even more determined to have actual communication with him. I was 17 and had no real training. What did I know. But I thought it odd that staff just fell into Ricky's patterns, asking predictable and repetitive questions to which they got his predictable and repetitive responses. One day early on, I tried something.
“Hi, Ricky,” I said.
Ricky smiled, weaving his head back and forth, which I already understood meant that he was excited and happy. “Hi. Hi, Ricky. Hi,” he replied.
“Did you have a good day today?” I asked.
“I had a good day today,” Ricky said.
“And what did you like about today?” I continued.
Ricky fell silent. He stopped swaying as if he were listening for something far off. Then he continued his dance, without answering me.
I tried again. “What did you like about today, Ricky?”
He paused again for a moment, then resumed his rhythmical bobbing. “It's nice,” he said.
I welled up (much as I'm doing even now as I recall it). Ricky had given a real answer!
I continued asking only questions which Ricky could not repeat or rephrase with ease. In what seemed a very short time, Ricky and I were having meaningful exchanges regularly.
I remember the day — or rather the night — that Ricky spoke first to me, without my having asked him anything. I had just tucked him into bed and he began to cry. “I'm sad,” he said. This was very unusual for someone like Ricky, to report on how he felt, however obvious.
“Why are you sad, Ricky?” I asked.
“Mom,” he said.
“You miss your mom?” I asked, again finding this peculiar behavior, even without any real training.
“I miss my mom,” he replied, giving in to his comfort zone of repeating. But that was all right. He'd already told me as much.
Ricky sobbed for a long time that night without any more talk. I stayed with him, lightly raking his hair with my fingertips or squeezing down his arm, which he enjoyed. After more than an hour, he finally fell asleep.
This same scenario played out for the next three nights. Ricky would cry when I put him to bed, and I would stay with him and get him to sleep. After a few days of contemplation at his bedside, I had concocted a plan. There was no way to be sure whether or not it would work, except to just try it and see what happened.
The next day was my day off. I picked up a painter's cap for $5.00. I chose it because it was soft and durable, and the lid was flimsy instead of hard. The following day, I tucked the hat inside my work bag. When bedtime came, sure enough, Ricky began to be homesick. I hated to think about the night before, because I knew the other staff member would not have stayed with him or comforted him. As Ricky began to cry, I took out the hat. I placed it into his hands and helped him feel it. “What do you think this is, Ricky?”
“A shirt,” he guessed.
“Nope. It's not a shirt. Good guess. Try again,” I urged.
“Try again,” he agreed. A few moments later, he said, “Underwear,” then scrunched his face up and giggled like he'd told a naughty joke.
Weeks ago, when Ricky had first arrived, I'd helped him unpack. He had exactly two pairs of yellowed underwear in which the elastic waistbands were stretched and torn. There were two undershirts and one pair of socks, all in similar repair, along with a couple of T-shirts, a pair of jeans and one pair of shorts. This was to last the whole summer. The following day, I had immediately gone shopping and later presented Ricky with a small but new wardrobe — one item at a time. And so it seemed he did remember the day I had given him the underwear, as he guessed at what lay in his hands now. The memory of Ricky's reddened face, giggling even as the tears of homesickness streamed down, is still very clear in my mind.
I laughed, too, and replied as if he'd really gotten me with his joke. “No, Ricky, it's not underwear, silly. It's a hat.”
“It's a hat,” he said, as if he'd thought of it himself. He felt around the opening and the rim again, trying to make sense of the new revelation.
“It's not just any hat, though,” I said mysteriously. “It's a magic hat.”
He didn't reply this time, just listened. I had his attention.
“Here's how it works. You say out loud all of the things you miss and love about home, and the hat remembers them. Then, you put on the hat, and it helps you think good things about what you miss, so you won't be sad while you fall asleep. So, here we go. Let's hold the hat together in our hands and think of as many things as we can think of that you love about home. What's first?”
“Mom,” Ricky said, sniffling.
“Good one! And what else do you love about home?” I prompted.
He scrunched his eyes, which were always closed, as if considering. “Cookies.”
“Cookies? Nice! And what else?”
“Books.” (I hadn't realized before then that, of course, he might like a bedtime story. But I didn't interrupt.) Ricky had already stopped crying as he thought. Before long, his answers became mumbles that meant he was drifting off . I took the hat from his hands.
“OK, now let's put the hat on you, so you can think about all those things you love about home,” I said as I pulled the hat over his mop of brown hair. He reached up and touched it, then pulled the covers up and fell asleep. “Good night, Ricky,” I said.
The plan had worked. And it continued to work every night thereafter at bedtime.
The 4th of July fell on a Saturday that year, and most parents had come on Friday to get their children for the weekend. Ricky's parents lived in New York, and so had not come. I offered to take Ricky to fireworks that night, even though I was not on shift. This was met with much debate. Bringing a blind student with multiple needs to an event like fireworks? Too upsetting. And you're not even working. But no one could argue that Ricky trusted me and was calmer when I was on. And I had clearance to drive the vans. My taking Ricky for the night would also mean that other staff would not have to stay on duty for one student.
And so, we went.
Now, I honestly can't remember how the next turn of events came about. But my sister Shannan wound up coming along. She was sixteen at the time, and had absolutely no experience with special needs. Still, she came. I wondered how she would be with Ricky.
Ricky grew very anxious as the crowds thickened approaching the main event. Shannan and I told him that fireworks would sound very loud and scary, but that it was the fun kind of scary. “It's fun,” he said, but he didn't seem too sure. Patriotic music played somewhere close by. My sister, without hesitation, asked Ricky if he would like to dance. Ricky's whole life was a dance, in a way — rocking and bobbing and doing the two-step. And so he accepted her offer. She helped him up and fell right into his little two-step, as if it were the cool kids' dance. “You're a really good dancer, Ricky,” she said.” He laughed his giddy laugh. “I'm a good dancer!” he shouted, elated to be dancing with a real live girl.
Soon, the first “test” rockets fired, and Ricky was clearly nervous. We sat down on the grass, my sister on one side, and I on the other, pressing in tight on either side so that Ricky would feel safe. “This is going to be a lot of fun!” I assured him. “All of the sounds will be different, because the fireworks look different.”
For Ricky, there would be no bursts of color. No designs in the air. No light — only sound. Ricky tilted his face upward in expectancy, as he waited for whatever would happen next, somehow understanding that the noise had come from above him.
Then my sister said something which I'd forgotten until the memory resurfaced last night: “I'll draw pictures on your back of what it looks like.”
It was brilliant, really. And moving.
The first legitimate explosions rained overhead. Ricky gasped, but he didn't seem anxious now. I squeezed his hand and said, “Wow! This is scary! Sometimes, it's fun to be scared!” Ricky smiled, with red light shining on his upturned face. Shannan got up and knelt behind Ricky, then wiggled her fingertips over his back in an outward motion approximating what was happening in the sky. The next one screeched out five separate rockets that spiraled away at the end. Ricky squeezed my hand tighter. My sister drew arcs with curly-Qs up Ricky's back, one at a time. And so it continued.
I really believe that Ricky was having all the fun of going to a scary movie with good friends. He began to laugh out loud, or crouch smaller at the bigger booms, giggling. All the while, I squeezed his hand as my sister drew forms.
THE BEST ADVICE SO FAR: Tenacious love expressed with creativity can work wonders.
Another shattering *BOOM* brought me back to the present, where I sat there with my fingertips still pressed over my eyes. A few tears escaped as I remembered Ricky and the events of that night.
I wondered where he was, and what he might be doing today.
I wondered if he still had the magic hat.
I wondered if he remembered me, or that night when he'd danced with a girl who smelled nice.
I wondered if he might be at fireworks somewhere even tonight, smiling, squeezing his hand tighter and feeling imaginary fingertips drawing pictures across his back.
What I did not need to wonder about — what I was certain of — was that time, creative energy and love had been well spent all those years ago.