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    • Living the Second Life

      “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” – Confucius

      This might be the most Stoic quote ever attributed to Confucius. Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or Seneca danced around this same concept: Life is short, we only have today, do something with this gift. Words, really, until you truly realize it… and live accordingly.

      I’m well into my “second life”, but for me that hasn’t meant dropping everything and sailing around the world. I have friends doing that and believe me, there are days when I’d like to. But I’m deep into the life I’ve built and living means something different to me at the moment. Last night I watched another close basketball game as my son’s team pulled out an important win. He’s down to his last four regular season games in his college career and it’s not lost on him that one way or another there just aren’t many more opportunities to play left for him. And he’s rising to the occasion, playing meaningful minutes, playing big and being a leader on the court. It meant another late night of driving for me, but I wouldn’t want to have been anywhere else in the world.

    • The First Cup Is The Deepest

      Yeah, I know, the lyric is the first cut is the deepest, not cup… but it applies equally well to both. Hear me out. I’d contend that there’s far more meaning, more depth, in the first cup of coffee, tea or alcoholic beverage than there is in any subsequent cup. Let’s use coffee as our example. It’s dark outside as the sun catches up with the early risers. I’ve just brewed my morning coffee, robust dark roast, thank you, and carefully monitor the temperature for that magical first sip. This is the most zen-like moment of the day for coffee consumption, and a moment when my mind is most open to new ideas. This is the magic cuppa, the most clear-headed and open my mind will be all day, undistracted by the clutter of life. This is where the deep thoughts happen.

      This morning I’m re-assessing my daily routine after the magic hour. The first hour of the day is by far the most productive, and I push to do everything that must be done before the muse fades into the ambient noise of life. For me that means writing, reading, and a quick survey of the bullet journal tasks I need to accomplish that day. That “magic hour” tends to be more like 90 minutes, and then I’m feeling the restlessness build with the volume of the ambient noise around me.

      The coffee cup is empty, the darkness of the morning has given way to light, and any moment now the night owl’s alarm clock will chirp upstairs. It’s time to shift gears to that first bullet in the journal, and the game of putting an X through as many as possible before the day ends. The ambient noise kicks in: What’s the weather today? Who won the Iowa Caucus? Why did the Red Sox trade one of the best players in baseball? Do I even care about the Red Sox anymore after the off-season they’ve had? And so on. Noise.

      I consider another cup of coffee, but I know it won’t be the same. Better to get moving, literally and figuratively, and get into the flow of the work day. Such is the daily battle. I feel the crush of things to do, sigh and get on with it. I wish that first cup would last all day.

    • Truck Day

      It hasn’t been a normal winter. Temperatures are milder, early winter snow has largely melted, ponds are at best unsafe to walk on. If Australia is burning, New England is experiencing one of the warmest winters on record. The world is unsettled… but small signs of familiar are out there if you look for them. Even if these too have an odd twist to them.

      Yesterday was Truck Day in Boston. That probably means nothing to most people in the world – and why would it? Truck Day is the first sign of spring on a normally cold and relentless winter, when snow storm after snow storm batters our very souls. And while the winter hasn’t spun into soul-crushing yet (there’s still time), Truck Day still highlights the rite of passage from thinking of winter to Hey! It’s almost Spring!

      Truck Day is when the Boston Red Sox roll their trucks full of baseballs and uniforms and God knows what from Fenway Park to Fort Myers, Florida to be unloaded and ready for Spring Training. It’s a light at the end of the tunnel, hope for better days ahead. Dreams of green in a brown, monochrome world. But even Truck Day feels different this year. The Red Sox fired their Manager in the midst of a cheating scandal, there’s talk of trading star players instead of excitement about the pitching rotation and the outfielders. No, it’s an unsettled winter on Causeway Street, which makes Truck Day just like everything else this winter; a bit off. Like waking up the first day you have symptoms of the flu off. And this winter, of all winters, comparing an event you normally look forward to to the flu isn’t the kind of light at the end of the tunnel that you want to see. It might just be that speeding train barreling towards you.

      But that’s pessimistic talk, and Truck Day, even with the chaos in the world and on the Red Sox, is a good sign. Maybe this will once again be their year. If they can find a Manager anyway. And then it hit me, this is how we used to think before the Red Sox started winning World Series. Jaded optimism disguised as pessimism after getting beaten down year-after-year by the Yankees or (going way back) the Orioles. Yeah, that’s the feeling I was trying to place, the feeling of dread hiding behind hope, as another season begins for The Olde Town Team. Buckle up everyone.

    • Meeting Luck

      Last night I won $225 in a Super Bowl office pool I didn’t participate in, from an office I don’t work in, and had little knowledge of before I was told I’d won. My wife picked a random square at her job, wrote my name on it and the score aligned with that random number. That’s random luck for you.

      Saturday I watched my son’s basketball team pull out a win as they broke the press in the final minutes and hit clutch free throws as time ran out for their opponent. The game could have gone either way, but key individual matchups and years of practicing how to break the press (get to the ball!) and shooting free throws made all the difference when the game mattered most. That’s making your own luck for you.

      It’s now Monday morning, the sky is slowly brightening, and I‘m well into the day already. I have a morning routine that, like practicing free throws, becomes muscle memory. If luck is random, it’s also fickle. I’ve never won millions of dollars in the lottery, but I know good luck when I see it. Like breaking the press, you’ve got to get up and meet it.

    • Palindrome

      02/02/2020 is almost over in this time zone, and it’s worth a mention before it passes by. Read it frontwards or backwards and it reads the same. Surely a novelty of the calendar. It hasn’t happened since 11/11/1111 and won’t happen again until well after all of us leave this planet (probably along with our grandchildren) on 12/12/2121. That’s an interesting date itself, and I wonder what the world will be like in 101 years? A better place or an environmental wasteland? At war or finally, blessedly at peace? The future holds the answer, and all we can do is influence it in some small way. Our token ripple on the pond of history. What shall that be?

    • In The Here

      “Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there,” or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that tears you apart inside.” – Eckhart Tolle

      If there’s a cause for frustration, resentment and dissatisfaction in life, it’s this battle between here and there. The have’s versus the have-nots. There’s a lot to be said for aspiring for more. After all, if we don’t have a vision of where we want to go, how do we find the most efficient path to get there? But when you focus too much on “there” it just makes you miserable inside. And who wants to be a miserable snot?

      No, the better approach is to practice gratitude for what you have now, in the here. Several people I follow advocate for writing down what you’re grateful for every day, to reinforce that spirit of gratitude and appreciation for what you have. And most of us have a lot. We’re truly wealthy, yet focus on what we don’t have. What a waste. Give me gratitude, and a focus on what I have today, even as I steer a course for tomorrow.

    • The Pilgrims and Pokanoket

      As you walk into the Mayflower Pub in London there’s a poster mounted high on the wall that shows the silhouettes of all the pilgrims and servants who sailed on the Mayflower to settle in America. The poster is divided in two, with the upper half showing the Pilgrims as they sailed from Europe. The lower half has the same image, but depicts those who perished before that first winter was over in gray. There’s a lot of gray… but by all rights it should have been all of them.

      The Pilgrims sailed for America too late in the season, without enough food, and sailed for the wrong place. Their charter had them settling at the mouth of the Hudson River, and instead they found themselves at the fist of Cape Cod. Turning south they almost wrecked on the treacherous shoals that have claimed thousands of ships since then. Turning back northward, the Captain of the Mayflower considered present-day Provincetown but eventually worked their way to the area that would become Plymouth., Massachusetts. Pilgrims were starting to die as freezing temperatures, tough living conditions aboard and malnutrition conspired against them. The Native American tribes were well aware of their presence and had already skirmished with them on Cape Cod at First Encounter Beach. A more sustained attack could easily have wiped them out.

      But the Pilgrims also had some lucky breaks that kept enough of them alive to establish a foothold in the region. They arrived at a place where just a few years earlier thousands of Native Americans lived. Contact with Europeans, most likely fishermen fishing the Gulf of Maine, triggered a plaque that killed thousands of people in the few years right before the Pilgrims arrived. So the native population was decimated and in no position to shove the Pilgrims back into the ocean they’d arrived on. They settled in an area with cleared fields and few adversaries. Truly fortunate to be there instead of landing in a place with a thriving and hostile Native American population.

      The other lucky break the Pilgrims caught was landing at a place where the local Sachem, Massasoit, saw strategic advantage in an alliance with the Pilgrims. The Pokanoket tribe Massasoit was Sachem of had been hit hard by the plaque that hit the tribes along the Gulf of Maine, and he was feeling pressure from the Narraganset tribe. An alliance with the Pilgrims gave him some strength in numbers that proved mutually beneficial for the short term. Ultimately this alliance would give the Pilgrims the momentum to survive and grow, but would destroy the Pokanoket in the next generation. An accident of geography brought the Pilgrims and Pokanoket together, time would drive them apart. But in the winter of 1620-1621, it would prove the difference in keeping more Pilgrims from turning into gray silhouettes on a poster 400 years later.

    • People Watching at the Airport

      Arriving early at the airport for my flight home, I knocked off a few thousand steps walking around the terminal. I’m stuck by the commitment to drinking at 7 AM as I passed bar after bar of people nursing adult beverages. I’m no prude, and you never know what time zone someone in an airport is from, but still, it was noteworthy. Then again, I’m on business travel, others are starting vacations, going to the Super Bowl, or calming pre-flight jitters. I don’t get jitters, I’m not going to the Super Bowl, and work beckons. But first those steps.

      I have emails dropping in my in-box and a business plan to write. I have follow-up to do after a week on the road. There’s no time for people-watching, but my eyes are drawn upward to the steady stream of people walking by on their long walk to faraway gates. Well, most are walking, while a few are sprinting at full speed, rolling luggage precariously skimming along beside them. Others are taking the courtesy carts, which hum on by, beeping warnings to drowsy zig-zaggers.

      I check email, draft a few bullet points for the business plan, stretch and look around again. More people streaming by. And more masks than normal as coronavirus makes the news-readers voices pitch upward in alarm and people who take precautions. The world isn’t a healthy place at the moment, with people and the planet exhibiting symptoms of larger problems. I have an equally-low tolerance for climate deniers and conspiracy theorists and party-first politicians alike. I know I don’t know everything, but I’ll be the first to admit that. Zealots who announce they have it all figured out if you’ll just trust their what they say (but not what they do) have no place in my world, thank you. But as you watch the stream of people walking by, you see that we’re all just people making our way from here to there. We’re all on the same journey, even the charlatans.

      I used to think I didn’t like Kobe Bryant or Alex Rodrigues, not because they’re bad people, but because they weren’t on the teams I was rooting for. Bryant passing away highlighted what a great person he was: by all accounts a great dad who was using his money and influence to make the world a better place. I noticed a change in myself about these characters you build up in your mind, opinions formed about someone based on a uniform or a political affiliation. I’m getting better at not passing judgement on people, and travel helps with that. We’re all pretty much the same, with a few outliers muddying up the waters. As I watch people walk by I’m not thinking about MAGA hat-wearers or liberal “woke” activists or which team someone cheers for in the Super Bowl. Maybe I need to stop judging zealots and charlatans too? You don’t have to follow someone just because they’re going in a direction you aren’t going in.

      If Kobe Bryant’s sudden death did anything, it was unite very different people in celebration of a life and mourning for it ending too soon. We’re all just marching down the terminal of life, expecting a certain destination we aren’t guaranteed. Given the tenuous nature of our time here, doesn’t it make sense to support each other on the journey? I think so anyway. And now you’ll have to excuse me, I have a plane to catch.

    • It’s Only Rock & Roll (But I Like It)

      The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is located in Cleveland, Ohio. As a music fan I’ve wanted to check this out for years, but I was rarely in Cleveland and when I was the HOF was inconveniently closed. It seems the HOF keeps banker’s hours, which is ironic given the lifestyles of the inductees. But there was hope: Wednesday’s they stay open until 9 PM, making it possible to visit for people who have day jobs!

      I stayed in a hotel downtown and walked down to the HOF. Cold wind off the lake reminded me of where I was and I zipped the last inch of collar up. As you walk closer rock music is playing on stacks of speakers that serve as sculpture while doubling as a magnet for something more. As you get closer the glass pyramid of the HOF rises up before you out of a sea of concrete. Big, bold red letters beg, Long Live Rock and I know I’ve arrived.

      Inside, you’re met by greeters who direct you down to the lowest level, the base of the pyramid, to purchase a ticket and dive right in. And suddenly you’re in it. The base is the foundation, and you see the blues and country artists who built rock & roll, but also the cities that played such a huge part in its spread and growth. Motown, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Liverpool… and yes, Cleveland. The museum is immersive, and you can spend a lot of time in each section or breeze through it. The experience is there for you if you want it.

      If you’ve been to a Hard Rock Café you’ve experienced a bit of the HOF’s vibe. Music plays as you look at a guitar that John Lennon played, or Eric Clapton played… or Jimi Hendrix played. There are plenty of musical instruments on display and I found them interesting, but the magic was in the outfits they wore, and the videos of the artists explaining how they created a song or rif while you’re looking at the instrument they created it on right in front of you. If most artists were smaller than you’d expect, Jimi Hendrix was a big dude. His outfits indicate his size, and you know he must have been even more powerful live onstage than the old videos show.

      As you climb the pyramid there are places to play instruments, places to reflect on the names of the inductees, and hidden surprises as you work your way up the pyramid. So what’s at the top? More rock & roll, more instruments and a surprising amount of elbow room. Sure, it was a Wednesday night in January, not a time you’d expect throngs of Rock & roll fans to pour into the Hall of Fame, but a lot more room to wander than I expected.

      One thing that didn’t surprise me; the exit leads you right through the gift shop. But what a gift shop! It was sprawling, featuring the usual assortment of clothing, collectibles and shot glasses, and something more, an actual record store where you could buy vinyl records or compact disks. And that’s where it all began for me back as a kid, sifting through records, looking at the covers and wondering what magic was inside. That’s the rock and roll experience that started it for me, and the experience that capped off my visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

    • Flight Path

      The roar starts around 5:30 and continues on for as long as the wind direction dictates.  There’s no mistaking when you’re staying in the flight path of a major airport, as the roar continues every couple of minutes until the rush of morning flights slows.  This is the world we live in; connected to all corners by dotted rhumb lines 30,000 feet in the air.  That connectedness is most apparent when your hotel is directly under the flight path of planes taking off.

      My room preferences follow me around the world.  Whenever I stay in a Hilton or Marriott property, there’s a note in the system reminding the person checking me in to stick this guy in a room at the end of the hall, away from the ice machine and elevators.  In most ways I’m not particularly fussy, but when it comes to sleep I’m not a fan of the late night hallway conversations and beer cooler fill-ups.  You do you, I’ll do me, we’ll both find a way to coexist.  As long as I don’t have to listen to you at 2 AM anyway.

      So with this kind of preference for quiet, why would I book a hotel in the flight path of a major airport?  Convenience, that’s why.  I’m an early riser and don’t care about the roar at 5:30 AM the way I’d care about it at midnight.  If I’m working on a laptop I probably have noise cancelling headphones on anyway, listening to music that they don’t perform on the Grammy’s anymore.  Funny how old you feel when the music industry passes you by…  but then again I’ve never been at the epicenter of pop music anyway.

      Today I pack up my bags and leave the flight path for the highway – Another source of the background roar of life on this planet.  Stand near a major highway and listen to the constant roar of cars and trucks flying by.  It’s not the same volume of roar as jets taking off but it’s more relentless.  I take full advantage of the infrastructure of rapid travel and convenience, but I don’t embrace it.  Like the hotel room, I prefer the quiet corners of the world, away from the very noise that I’m adding to in my business travel.  The irony isn’t lost on me, but as long as I’m participating in the world economy I need to dance with the roar.  Until I can cancel it out again anyway.