Make Friends With Time

♫ ♫  Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes.

How do you measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee?

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife?

How do you measure a year in a life?   ♫ ♫

So begins the second act of “Rent,” the Broadway mega-hit musical of a few years ago. And the next lines are, "How about love? Seasons of love."

I recalled these words recently when my friend Tim, who’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, commented that he might not be here a year from now. In the time remaining he’s trying to enjoy every moment and take one day at a time. I guess you could say he’s measuring time in “daylights, sunsets, midnights, and cups of coffee.”

A day, of course, is 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; and 86,400 seconds. That’s a lot of moments, when you think about it; a lot of precious time not to waste, a point the Hermit Philosopher’s cousin Doug Smith makes in his book, Happiness, The Art of Living with Peace, Confidence and Joy.

Doug’s major premise is that to be happy we need to live in the present. He quotes an old Eskimo proverb: “Yesterday is ashes, tomorrow wood. Only today the fire burns brightly.”

That’s just one of many ways to make the point that we only have now. We need to use “now” effectively because it’s all we’ve got. Regretting the past and worrying about the future wastes energy. And, because it’s inefficient, multi-tasking wastes the “now.”

We all do it. As I sketched out the first few paragraphs of this post I had a football game showing on TV and was continually interrupted by email pings, text messages, and moves my opponents made on my Words With Friends app. In this “atmosphere of manic disruption,” as Michael Harris calls it in his book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, I realized that I wasn’t concentrating on the task at hand. I needed to make friends with time.

Time is a savings account that begins each day with 86,400 units of currency. The balance decreases steadily, reaches zero at midnight, and gets replenished in the same amount one tick later. So, the key to being happy and productive is to spend that currency wisely — be present in the moment, stop multi-tasking, and “do now what you are doing now,” as Doug puts it. When I’m tethered to my devices and trying to do many things at once, I’m not being a friend with time and I’m on the path to frustration and unhappiness.

Doug suggests a method for staying present in the moment. He calls it “thresholds,” an idea given to him by a business consultant. The technique is to think of every door you pass through as new starting point. As you cross the threshold, concentrate on where you are, not where’ve you’ve been or where you need to be minutes or hours later. Focus solely on what you’re to do in that place you just entered.

Before I started using “thresholds” I did a lot of thinking about the hereafter. I would enter a room and wonder, “What am I here after?” The “thresholds” technique helps me focus. Helps me stay present in the moment. Helps me make friends with time.

In an article about the death of David Cassidy, his daughter, actress Katie Cassidy, quotes the singer’s last words: “So much wasted time.” She then vows that this is a daily reminder for her to share her gratitude with those whom she loves and never to waste another minute.

It’s a good reminder for us all. ■

The Fog of Loss

Mission Hills. Autumn time just begun, and the Hermit Philosopher is writing in his den. Things are bleak in the house. There’s fog everywhere. Virtual fog.  Fog in the valley, where the river trickles to the bay. Fog on the ocean as sailboats dance with aircraft carriers. Fog shrouding the bridge to Coronado and the animals at the zoo. Fog in his condo and in his mind. It is the fog of grief. He has lost a dear, dear friend.

She and he were in college together. Law school too. They communed together – were intimately involved – on perhaps half a dozen occasions over the years. Each time was better than the time before. He loved her dearly.

But recently the friend began to come apart with age. Her skin turned brownish and flakey. Her spine was bent. She was literally falling apart at the seams.

The decline started right after Mr. Tulkinghorn died. He was a lawyer ­– a murder victim, you might recall – and his death precipitated a crisis among some of his most prominent clients. The HP’s friend was a major part of that story. In fact, she was that story. It was only because of her that anyone has ever heard of Mr. Tulkinghorn, his crusty old client Lester Dedlock, or the seminal case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which case grubbed on for generations in the chancery courts and was the great misfortune of so many suitors.

As if that were not enough trouble, poor Jo died and Mrs. Dedlock disappeared when disgraced and suspected – wrongly – of the lawyer’s murder. (The maid did it.) Mrs. D’s daughter, Esther, went searching for her but found her dead at the gravesite of her former lover, Esther’s father. About that time Lester had a stroke, Esther contracted smallpox, and her cousin Richard died of tuberculosis.

With all this sorrow, the HP’s friend had the dickens of a time, becoming more and more frail and finally expiring just last week. The HP visited her to say good-bye and extract all the memories he could. The fog-enshrouded thoughts of many years that had been marginally recorded are now saved like flies in amber, every line rewritten and preserved for a newer, stronger lover. One with a robust back and clearer skin. Heavier, perhaps, but fit for many more trysts.

Thanks go to Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) for his literary masterpiece and to Signet Classics for my frail paperback friend. 

Thanks also to Scholar Select Books for scanning and reproducing – in hardback form – a library copy of the 1885 edition of Bleak House, which sits proudly on my bookshelf in Dewey Decimal System category 823 (English Fiction) alongside A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and others. ■

Why the Anger?

Tea Party Patriot

For quite some time the Hermit Philosopher has been trying to wrap his mind (and his keyboard) around why the “American Right” is so angry. Why they feel like outsiders. Why, for example, a Congressman would tell people, “We have to take our country back from a government that has ignored our Constitution, dismissed our Conservative values, and spent our tax dollars like drunken sailors.”

Really? From the HP’s viewpoint, this is nonsense and political pandering. The country wasn’t taken away, it merely detoured through the Great Recession. But since then unemployment has fallen by half, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has doubled, and 11.3 million jobs were added to the economy. “Red America” should have been happy.

But Mr. Tea Party Patriot and his friends remained disgruntled. The HP wondered, what have they lost? What is it they “want back?” What are they so angry about?

Recent Book Has Some Answers

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, provides some interesting answers to these questions. 

For a number of months, sociologist and author Arlie Hochschild traveled a stronghold of the conservative right—Louisiana bayou country—and interviewed dozens of people. She consistently found stories of lives ripped apart by loss of the American Dream, stagnant wages, and fear of cultural change. Contrary to the liberal idea that these folks have been duped into voting against their own best interests, she concludes that their views make sense in the context of their lives and their emotional—albeit not their economic—interests.

Having read Strangers on the heels of Deep South (see the post of April 30), the HP is finally beginning to understand that the resentments of "red" Americans flow from what Hochschild calls a “deep story,” one that goes beyond facts or rational judgment and supports the conservative world view.

Red America’s Deep Story

The deep story goes like this—

You are patiently standing in a long line for something you call the American Dream. You are white, Christian, of modest means, and getting along in years. You are male. There are people of color behind you, and in principle you wish them well. But you’ve waited long and worked hard, and the line is barely moving.

Then: Look! There are people cutting in line ahead of you! Who are these interlopers? Some are black, others are women, immigrants, refugees. They get affirmative action, sympathy, welfare—benefits for the listless and idle. They are the “takers,” and the government wants you to feel sorry for them.

And who ran the government for eight years? The biracial son of a low-income single mother, and he’s cheering on the line cutters! In fact, he and his wife are line cutters too, you think. And while all of this is happening, the liberal, fake news media mock you as racist or homophobic or stupid. Everywhere you look, you feel betrayed. The American Dream is slipping farther and farther away.

A Uniting Force

When Hochschild described this story to the people she interviewed, they related strongly to it. “You’ve read my mind,” one said. “I live your analogy,” said another. And last November we learned that 63 million other people also resonate with the Deep Story.

To paraphrase Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Washington Post, these are people who dislike foreigners, oppose same-sex marriage, and were offended that the White House was occupied by a black guy with a funny name. Rather than vote for a woman and continue to feel threatened by cultural change, they united behind “a lying, narcissistic, manifestly incompetent child man” (Pitts’ words) who hasn’t a clue about how government works. 

The HP doesn’t buy into the racial finger-pointing and class resentments that underlie the Deep Story for some folks. Rather, he thinks unchecked corporate power and technological transformation are largely to blame. (Consider Amazon versus the corner grocery, and solar power versus coal mining.) Nevertheless, it’s clear that demographic and cultural changes have taken from Mr. Tea Party Patriot and millions of others the status they once enjoyed and the dream they sought. 

The Great Paradox

But here is the Great Paradox of our age, as Hochschild sees it. The people she met have poor economic, educational and health indicators and are the ones among us who could benefit most from government programs in those arenas. But they abhor the very idea of government help and view as suspect almost everything the government does. “It has gone rogue, corrupt, malicious and ugly,” one Tea Partier complained. “It can’t help anybody.”

When confronted with facts, people living the paradox are not disabused of their biases. For example, contrary to some of the common beliefs Hochschild’s subjects held: 

   - Only 8% of the federal budget goes toward “welfare”; 

   - Most people on welfare have jobs ; 

   - Fertility rates of minorities and whites are virtually identical; 

   - Government employees are not overpaid—they get less than their private sector counterparts; and 

   - Unemployment and GDP numbers are usually better under Democratic Presidents

But despite cracks in its factual foundation, the Deep Story persists as a matter of the right’s perception. And, as we all know, perception is reality to most of us.

Blue America’s Deep Story

Hochschild posits that liberals have their own Deep Story. In it, they are standing around a large public square that contains theaters, libraries, museums, schools, and similar institutions available to everyone. They are proud of this cultural infrastructure because it’s all-inclusive. People who were once “outsiders” are freely welcome. This feels to them like the American values represented by the Statue of Liberty.

But then something alarming happens. Marauders invade the public square, recklessly dismantle it, and steal the bricks and concrete from the public buildings. Those who were so proud of what they had built watch in horror as the elites who dismantled it erect McMansions with the building materials they had just stolen, thus privatizing the public realm.

Hochschild sums up the moral of Blue America’s story by saying, “The right can’t understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life.” Then she adds that ironically, the right may have more in common with the left than they imagine, for “many on the left feel like strangers in their own land too.”

Not Red vs. Blue

We won’t see an end to this culture clash any time soon. In fact, it may get worse given the impulsive and divisive temperament of the current President. But ironically, the Tea Partiers and the liberals/progressives face some common challenges—extreme automation and global capitalism, for example—and both sides call for some “activist” responses by government.

Trying to “make America great again,” the Red side wants to circle the wagons around family and church and have government provide incentives to shore up traditional industries like auto manufacturing and coal mining. The Blue side calls for government help to restore our crumbling infrastructure, invest in schools, and support newer industries like autonomous cars and solar power.

Somewhere in this great land there must be a few unifying personalities who can find common ground and restore the American Dream for everyone. It’s not a binary, zero/sum, win/lose game. We’re all in this together. 

The Deepest Story should be neither red, nor blue; it should be purple.

# # #

Thank You for Your Service

CDR, JAGC, USN

Readers of a certain age will understand when I say that the public’s attitude toward the military has changed. When I began active duty in 1971 as a Navy JAG officer, the nation was in the midst of the largest anti-war movement in our history. There had been years of pacifist marches, resistance to the military draft, and unrest on college campuses (including the burning of ROTC buildings).

The angry mood was inflamed when unarmed student protesters were killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University 47 years ago this month:

Richard Nixon’s promise to bring the troops home was a factor in his narrow victory over Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election, but it wasn’t until 1973 that the last combat troops left Vietnam. My college roommate, who served as a Navy officer onboard ship during the war, recalls that when he flew back to the States his military bus from Travis AFB to San Francisco was attacked by protesters. “We were literally stoned,” Rick says. “Stoned! We had to duck down and change out of our uniforms so we could sneak off the bus and meld into the crowd.”

Not everyone shared this anti-military, anti-war sentiment, of course, but some of it was still festering during my last four years of active duty in the late 70s. I was stationed in the DC area, and we were under orders not to wear the uniform except one day a week or for special occasions. This was to maintain a low military profile ... in the nation's capital, of all places.

But soon, attitudes began to change. Rick remembers a poignant incident when he was on the way to a summer Naval Reserve training assignment a few years later. "I was in uniform, in an airport, waiting for my plane. I went to the bar and ordered a beer. When the waitress brought it, she told me it was compliments of the gentleman at the end of the bar. I went over to thank the guy, but he replied, 'Don't thank me; I need to thank you. You went to Vietnam instead of me.'"

That kind of appreciative sentiment started to take hold during the Reagan years (1981-89), and a generation later it seems firmly established, so much so that today we veterans receive thanks. And almost daily we see heartwarming scenes of servicemembers returning home to their families or paraded out at sporting events for the singing of the national anthem.

Here in San Diego—still very much a military town—veterans are asked to stand and be recognized at the start of Padres games. At first I was uncomfortable with this practice. I had only joined the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army, and in fact I got an induction notice five days after I signed with the Navy recruiter. The Navy program gave me a draft deferment for law school, obliged me to serve for four years, and kept me out of combat. Eventually I "sailed" a Navy desk for eight years of active duty, all of them "state-side."

So when I went to my first Padres game in the new stadium five years ago, I didn't feel I deserved the recognition veterans were asked to stand for. As Rick says, "At one time I was treated as if I were a pariah, and then it changed to being treated like a hero. In reality, I was neither one."

Like Rick, I too was neither one. I merely did what I could do to keep from being the target of enemy fire. I don't deserve anyone's thanks. It is I who should thank the Navy.

But I do stand at Padres games. I've come to realize that the offer of recognition is not so much about my and other veterans' service as it is about the country's desire, subconscious though it may be, to atone for the years in which service personnel—many of whom did not agree with the politicians' decision to go to war—were subjects of scorn and contempt.

Somewhere between the abuse Rick and I and others felt 45 years ago and the veneration the military receives today lies a proper level of appreciation. I guess it is summed up with this simple, oft-repeated phrase: "Thank you for your service."

Deep South

The Hermit Philosopher just finished reading Deep South, a luminous ode to a region that he traversed many times early in life and then lived in for 15 years before finally moving to California. The book chronicles Paul Theroux’s recent travels along the back roads of the Confederacy and describes  encounters with the real South – the South that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years, the South you can’t see from an interstate and usually forget about when in big cities like Atlanta and New Orleans.

19th C. house; no plumbing or electricity

Theroux makes the reader feel what life is like in the backwater (and largely minority) communities of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. He describes the plight of resolute and friendly people living with the vestiges of segregation, their incomparable music and cuisine contrasting with cruel poverty, high unemployment, poor schools, and some of the country’s worst housing. The paradoxes are striking.

Some personal recollections

Having been born in St. Louis and grown up in Terre Haute, IN, I was never far from the South as a kid. And for perhaps 20 years in a row we made the thousand-mile trip to Daytona Beach for spring vacation. In the days before interstate highways, it was two tortured days on tortuous two-lane roads, my white-knuckled father at the wheel migrating us down US 41 through Evansville, Hopkinsville, Nashville, Huntsville, hell-bent on getting us there – at an average speed of about 40 miles per hour – so he could “relax” for ten days before repeating the automotive ordeal in the opposite direction.

All the “villes,” it seemed, were county seats, and the Auto Club’s “TripTik” routed us through each one, into every downtown, and past each courthouse along the way. These personalized, loose-leaf travel documents from the AAA taught me how to read a map, an essential skill because as the navigator I had to be constantly on the lookout for the next road sign. Should we miss it, we might take 231 instead of 431 and end up in Laceys Spring instead of New Hope. Heaven forbid.

When not navigating, my brother and I passed the time looking for Burma Shave signs, noting license plates from far-off places, or playing the “alphabet game.” Heaven help the boy who had to pee, because my dad was loath to stop for anything but gas or coffee. Always thinking of our wellbeing, he brought along empty milk cartons that my brother and I were welcome to use in the event of a serious urological need. 

 

My memories of these trips through the 1950s-60s South also include run-down motels, gas station restrooms marked “Men,” “Women,” and “Colored,”  and billboards that implored us to “Impeach Earl Warren.” Not a happy place in the days of Jim Crow laws.

Water’s on the wrong side

In one section of his compelling travelogue, Theroux describes a view of the Mississippi River from atop the bluffs at Natchez, MS. I drove through Natchez a few times when I was working in Baton Rouge and had to go to Monroe, LA (near Arkansas). As a St. Louis native and resident for 20+ years, it’s impossible for me to see Old Man River without being moved, as Theroux was. “A river is history made visible, the lifeblood of a nation,” Theroux writes, and in our country the Mississippi is the aorta of rivers, the fourth longest in the world. 

But something struck me about a view of the river from Natchez or Baton Rouge: the water seemed to be on the wrong side!  In St. Louis, the Mississippi is never far from one’s mind, and it is to the east, on your right as you face north. Likewise, when I lived in Chicago, Lake Michigan was on the right, and in Daytona Beach the ocean was on the right. But in Natchez or Baton Rouge the river’s on the left – the “wrong” side. I found it disorienting, the same feeling I had when I first moved to San Diego in the mid-70s. There the Pacific seemed to be on the wrong side. I was 180° turned around for the first couple of months.

I’m south, but not Deep South

My place in San Diego is about as far south as you can go in California. It’s roughly the latitude of the Deep South towns of Philadelphia and Meridian, MS;  Selma, Demopolis, and Montgomery, AL;  and Columbus, Albany, and Macon, GA. My homes in Baton Rouge and Orlando were farther south geographically, but even they – being large cities – are not part of the Deep South that Theroux describes. If the residents of Deep South were to leave the Mississippi Delta floodplain, the cotton fields of rural Alabama, or the peanut farms of Georgia, they would probably feel as turned around, disoriented, and out of place in San Diego as I once was.

I’m grateful to be where I am, but also thankful to have an understanding of what "Deep South" means. I may be south now, but I’m not in Deep South, and the ocean is no longer on the wrong side. It’s where it’s supposed to be.

And so am I.

# # #

I'm Baaack!

It’s been awhile since the Hermit Philosopher put fingers to keyboard, but he’s been busy. In particular, he finished a number of books in the last couple of months. The first was Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary, a work the HP had long heard of but never bothered to read. Quelle dommage, for it brought back fond memories of Tolstoy’s first true novel, Анна Каренина (i.e., Anna Karenina for you Anglophones).

The second was the little gem shown here. As a confessed word nerd – why is that not spelled “werd nerd”? – I was intrigued by this spirited romp through the inner workings of the Merriam-Webster company and the art of writing dictionary definitions. As anyone who’s tried it knows, that's a hella hard thing to do well.

One of the many things I learned from Word by Word is that there’s a name for my feeling and love for language: sprachgefül. I also learned that you can’t have sprachgefül; instead, sprachgefül has you. The author, Kory Stamper, says it's “like a Teutonic imp that settles itself at the base of your skull and hammers at your head every time you read something like ‘crispy-fried rice’ on a menu.” 

Does that mean regular rice that has been flash fried, or does it refer to what we know as “fried rice” prepared in a new and exciting way? The Teutonic imp giggles and squeezes my brain a little harder even as I type this. 

Sprachgefül is also the condition that makes me want to take a marking pen and insert "more than" on a certain poster in the Vons grocery store near my home. It’s not vandalism if it’s correcting English usage, right?

The third book that had the HP’s attention was The Law of Healthcare Administration (8th ed.) The gestation period was about 22 months, and she weighed in at almost exactly three pounds when born in February. 

Ordinary prose is inadequate to express fully my appreciation for the editorial team at Health Administration Press (HAP) that made this possible, so let me try doing so in a different way (and with props to Ms. Stamper)—

ed•i•tor \‘e-dǝ-tǝr\ n -s : a person who prepares something (such as books or other printed materials) for publication; especially : one who reads, alters, adapts, and corrects a health law text numerous times while simultaneously asking insightful questions and convincing the writer that though the MS is good, it is not yet as good as it could be. < Shout out to Theresa Rothschadl and Janet Davis, my steadfast and patient editors par excellence and their production team at HAP; they are all worth their weight in gold! >

In other words, the Hermit Philosopher – this harmless drudge – could not have made his contribution to the literature of health care law without the help of these dedicated professionals. As Tolstoy would say: большое спасибо! (Bol'shoye spasibo! Many thanks!)

FYI the textbook is available at https://www.ache.org/publications/product.aspx?pc=2326

До свидания! (Do svidaniya! Good-bye!)

Post-Election Stress Disorder (PESD)

The Hermit Philosopher has been dismayed, discomfited, and disheartened for nearly two months – since the morning of November 9, specifically. It has been hard for him to accept that our next President will be an egomaniacal, misogynistic, buffoon and that his party will soon control all three branches of the federal government.

Nevertheless, that is the situation. It is not a delusion. And we will live through it, just as we have lived through other uncertain periods.

One precarious time in our history stands out in the HP’s mind. It was 1861, and Lincoln was being inaugurated on the eve of the Civil War. The election that previous November had not been the cause of PESD that year, but many in the population must have felt similar symptoms.

Recognizing this, Lincoln spoke words that might bring comfort to us today. Here is the memorable passage with which he closed his first inaugural address:

[If] the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.

Though passion may have strained [us], it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Despite the passions that strain us today, we can do naught but hope that those better angels will bring mystic chords of humility and common sense to the new administration during the next four years.