I’m not going to lie to you, the last month has been a whirlwind of change, travel and starting all over again. We collectively face massive cultural changes in this new world that we’re all sorting sorting out in our own way. I’ve got plenty on my mind already, so the national election will have to be stacked in the corner to percolate for awhile.
In medias res (“into the midst of things”) is the phrase that exemplifies the state I’m in. I’m jumping right into the next after a busy and productive month. For all that I’ve accomplished over the last month, I ought to pause and reflect, but there’s no time for it. I see the swirling current in front of me and I’m focused on staying afloat.
And that’s the key word when we’re in the midst of things: focus. Focus on the essential next thing that will keep us from drowning in the current of change. Put one foot in front of the other, and keep moving across that floor. To get swept away in any emotion doesn’t serve us well, it pulls us under. The next essential thing is the only thing that matters right now. So let’s get to it.
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou
Every trip reminds me that we’re mostly all the same. Would that everyone travel more, that they too might learn this lesson. True, the popular tourist destinations are already crowded enough, but the lessons aren’t learned on a tour bus or cruise ship anyway. To know people we must meet them on their terms, where they live, without the sticker telling everyone which group we’re in.
I am a diplomat without the pension plan. Wherever I go, I work to meet people halfway. That may be Rome or London now and then, but mostly it’s the person next to me on a train or a restaurant. I don’t know who they voted for most of the time (unless they’re wearing the uniform), but it honestly doesn’t matter anyway. The job of the diplomat is to build bridges, not to tear them down.
Each day I work my craft. It’s not manipulation I practice, but the craft of reaching understanding and finding something in common with that human I’m interacting with. Most people reflect back that which we project onto them (the rest are narcissists or psychopaths—it helps to realize when you encounter them too). The diplomats are the ones who keep this fabric of humanity woven together. Someone’s got to do it.
A place like Dublin deserves a good pub crawl to really say that you’ve been there. Whether you drink or not isn’t the point, it’s the opportunity to immerse yourself into Irish culture and celebrate life all at once that makes a pub crawl a great experience. Of course, if you partake a few drinks can help one in that immersion business.
The name “pub” is short for “public house”, which itself was used to differentiate them from private houses and thus able to serve alcohol. You’ll still see many a pub calling themselves a public house, and it brings us full circle back to the roots. Whatever you call them, they’ve become central community gathering places for generations, making them integral to our cultural history. I’ll drink to that!
There are a few things one ought to seek out in a pub when choosing which of the hundreds in a place like Dublin to visit. For me, a bit of history counts for a lot. If I never get to Dublin again in my lifetime (and that would be a pity), then I’d want to get to a place with some history. No pub has more of that than Ireland’s oldest pub, The Brazen Head, a place that “has been a hostelry… since 1198. The present building was built in 1754 as a coaching inn.” The food was excellent and the Guinness was a perfect compliment. Walking around it, you feel you’re living your moment in its long history.
Darkey Kelly’s isn’t quite as old as The Brazen Head, but it has its own rich history. “Darkey” Kelly was a brothel-keeper who was burned at the stake in Dublin in 1761 for witchcraft. She almost certainly wasn’t a witch, but there was evidence that she was a serial killer. Rough way to go for anyone, of course, and why did it always seem to be the women being burned at the stake? Anyway, the pub itself was lively and filled with music and conversation, everything you’d want in a pub. The Irish whiskey collection was the largest I’ve seen. And as a bonus the Ireland-New Zealand rugby match was on, capturing the enthusiastic attention of the locals. It was my favorite of the bunch.
As a nightcap for the evening, The Old Storehouse, brought more live music with a young and active drinking crowd. In fact, noticeably younger. The later it gets, the younger the crowd gets. And that young crowd surprised me as they belted out the hits of the 70’s and 80’s as if they grew up with them )which of course they have, they were merely reminding me). The duo played to the crowd with far more rock and disco hits than traditional Irish music, but with a talented fiddle player sprinkling beautiful Celtic all over them.
No trip to Dublin would be complete without at least a pass by The Temple Bar. It’s surely lovely to look at, but more than any other pub it’s geared towards the tourists, prices and all. Still, worthy of a quick visit, if only for the obligatory photo with it. After all, what’s a pub crawl without seeing and being seen with the most famous of them all?
Clowns to the left of me Jokers to the right Here I am, stuck in the middle with you — Stealers Wheel, Stuck in the Middle With You
For those of us stuck in the middle with the extremists on either side of the political spectrum, these are challenging times indeed. Those who aspire to personal excellence must reconcile that objective with the circle of people surrounding them. On the face of it that sounds arrogant and more than a little condescending, but I will stand by the belief that we are the average of the people we associate with the most, and lately popular opinion leaves a lot to be desired. When did this become a desired outcome?
We must hold the line anyway and work to show others who would follow the path. Progress is never a straight line to the top. These are things I tell myself when the world lets me down a bit. The issue isn’t with the world, frustrating as it may be, but with my hope that the world will see the light and surpass my expectations. We must work on ourselves instead, for that’s all we may control anyway. Still, navigating to a better middle seems necessary too.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
Well, today is election day in the United States, and we’ll see once again whether all those stories we tell ourselves about forming a more perfect union are true. That’s the thing about democracy: it lives on a knife edge with just enough willing participants to keep the game going. Just enough of us will vote for the stories or we won’t quite get it done and this will all fall apart on our watch. Either way, we all believe we’re on the right side of history, while roughly half of us are completely wrong.
Live and let live, we tell ourselves, and we go on our merry way. Just don’t piss us off by pointing out the inconsistencies in that story. Be a “real American” or get out, some would tell us. As if there’s one homogenized version of real. Don’t dare call bullshit on that happy illusion or you’ll have the worst tendencies of the indignant in your business.
Any reader of this blog is likely inclined towards the freedom of the individual to live the life for themselves that they choose. We all see the signs and flags and threats of violence if some don’t get their way. Not all stories have a happy ending, after all, and what’s right for me may not be right for you. We aren’t meant to agree on everything, but let’s pretend for a few hours that we want to stop playing games with our freedom and vote as if our lives depended on it. Maybe that will be just enough.
He who does not travel, who does not read, who can not hear music, who does not find grace in himself, she who does not find grace in herself, dies slowly. He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem, who does not allow himself to be helped, who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops, dies slowly. — Martha Medeiros, Die Slowly
Sure, this blog is one big reminder to live in the moment and to savor it all. Amor fati already! The aim is a counter narrative to the relentless soundtrack of outrage, nihilism and distraction found in most media platforms nowadays. Be the change you wish to see in the world and all that. In this way the blog is a lifeline to anyone who needs to hear it, beginning with the author.
What became clear a thousand posts or so ago is that writing a blog is a solitary act of self reflection shared with the world, or at least the few that seek it out or stumble upon it. Travel, reading, music, gardening, hiking—whatever it is we’re exploring in the season and discovering within ourselves ought to be fair game. Every day is a statement of here we are.
We are alive today, and maybe not tomorrow. We must heighten our appreciation for that gift and find within ourselves the grace to accept and carry the weight of our brief shelf life. Not to dwell on it, just to acknowledge it as a compelling reason to jump back into the dance with life.
So bravo to the adventurous spirits who seize their precious lives and get after it. We all should be so bold. You do you, I’ll do me, and perhaps we’ll meet on the dance floor one day soon. If we are blessed to meet again, may we each have our share of intriguing stories to tell.
“Don’t try to be young. Just open your mind. Stay interested in stuff. There are so many things I won’t live long enough to find out about, but I’m still curious about them. You know people who are already saying, ‘I’m going to be 30—oh, what am I going to do?’ Well, use that decade! Use them all!” — Betty White
If life is a series of time buckets, we ought to be making the most of each bucket we happen to reside in at this particular stage of our life. My entire life transformed from 10 to 20, and again from 20 to 30, and so on to now. The decade I’m in has been revelatory for the transformation it has brought to my life and for the speed with which it’s going by. It all flies by, we just have to make full use of the time.
Each decade is a climb, and climbs are filled with setbacks, false summits, detours and exhausting ascents that seem to go on forever without relief. Alternatively, we might look at the decade as meandering through a maze, encountering all sorts of interesting or even terrifying paths, with a series of dead ends we must back away from, before we reach the other side. Whatever life means to us, it ought to be exhilarating and interesting as we begin each day, for this stage of our lives is rapidly coming to an end, and the next is just around the corner.
The key is staying interested, as Betty White pointed out, and with our interest sparked getting fired up for the next. To explore what lies just beyond where we’ve been thus far is a lifetime adventure which we can all subscribe to. Be bold! This next decade will fly by too, and what will our memories be then? We must exploit each leap into the unknown for all it offers in order to live a full life.
“Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man’s life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
In a lifetime we may encounter thousands of people. If you search the Internet you’ll find that the average person meets about 80,000 people in their lifetime. Some of us have met that many people before the middle of our presumed lifespan. But we aren’t here to compete for the most people met in a lifetime, we’re here to make meaningful connections. As the name implies, connections are those people who come into our lives at just the right time with whom we naturally bond with. These are people who transcend the convenience of place and time and become lifetime associates. They are as invested in our well-being as we are in theirs. They are the precious few.
What forms that bond? Usually something like shared experience, be it the good, bad or ugly. When you go through something with someone that few others would understand, sometimes you become lifetime friends. Then again, sometimes you drift apart never to speak again. Some of the people I rowed with felt like best friends until the diplomas came and I haven’t seen them since. One or the other of us had moved on, and so it goes. Same with old work connections, or fellow soccer parents, or whomever. Something in the moment brings us together, but once it’s gone the bond is gone too. It’s like the Post-It note of friendships: friends of convenience skating that indivisible point of now but not forever.
And that’s okay too. We can’t very well have 80,000 best friends, or even close associates. We’d simply never have the time to maintain the connection and get anything else done. Most relationships are transactional, and it’s nothing personal, simply pragmatic. We may remember people fondly from our past lives and catch up with them at a reunion one day, or maybe not even that. The few that stick with us are there because they want to be, just as we want to be. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.
Coming back to that indivisible point that Marcus Aurelius mentioned, we ought to put our full energy into the connections of now. We can’t very well say to ourselves that we’ve got our precious few and that’s enough for me. That next person we meet on the climb to 80,000+ might just be the one who makes all the difference in our lives, or we in theirs. When we make every encounter a moment of connection, we raise the average of our overall experience on this planet. We also find that our few become even more precious as the investment made by both parties naturally increases to meet the place we’ve arrived at in our lives. It always comes back to this: we get what we put into it.
“It is far better to borrow experience than to buy it.” — Charles Caleb Colton
Our lifestyle is roughly the same most days. My bride and I have nomadic tendencies, but circumstances are keeping us local lately more than in other ports of call. The pup and aging parents are our chosen anchors at this season in our lives, and we largely embrace the opportunity to spend time we won’t get back with each. Still, those nomadic tendencies stir under the surface. And this is where strategically borrowed experience can fill the gap.
Most of us borrow experience, through reading great novels, watching immersive media, taking a weekend in a bed & breakfast somewhere or living abroad for an extended period for work, school or simply to change the landscape we walk out to each day. Often these borrowed experiences are a right of passage at different stages of our lives: going off to summer camp, going off to university, moving to a new place to start a job, and finding the religious, philosophical, political and social structures to wrap around ourselves to make that experience more fulfilling for us in that time in our lives.
When does borrowed experience become a wholesale change in lifestyle? Probably the moment you stop thinking of the experience you’re having as borrowed at all. We grow into our lives, don’t we? Those structures we build around ourselves become our normal: physical structures like the roof over our heads or the boat we bob around in, social structures like the people who act as our touchstones in the world, each become part of our identity as we root ourselves into living that experience. At some point we aren’t borrowing the experience, the experience is who we are.
Isn’t it better to try on the shoes before you buy them, just to see how they fit? We may find that once tried is just enough, or alternatively, that we love how we feel in them. Either way, we’ve had the experience and, if we’re fortunate, have the agency to choose what to do next. Life is change, after all, and those things we dabble in for a weekend getaway can easily become who we have become. The thing is, once we become that next thing, we begin to borrow other experiences and the whole thing begins again.
“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.” —Frank Smith, To Think: In Language, Learning and Education
I’ve been skimming along with multiple languages for years now. Visit a country, try to learn some of the language. Visit another country, do it again with their native language. The similarities are easy to see when you do this with several languages in this way, we’re all connected after all. The thing about skimming is you pick up just enough to ask for the bathroom at a cafe or say please and thank you, but you aren’t immersing yourself in it long enough to keep up with rapid fire conversation, let alone mastery.
I recently surpassed 1600 days in a row of learning on Duolingo. It’s a bit of an artificial accolade because there are streak busters that patch up a missing day here and there. Just before that 1600 day mark I missed two days in a row while on business travel and thought the whole thing would reset to zero. But no, it just repaired itself and here I am, a master of French, German, Portuguese and Italian (the languages I’ve been learning off and on during that streak). Which is nonsense, because dabbling in an app makes you a master of nothing but casual productivity.
Still, there’s something about meeting someone halfway by learning their native language just enough to maintain a slow roll through a pleasant conversation. They almost certainly know some of my native language, but my speaking theirs informs them that I have some measure of respect for their identity that I’m willing to step out of my comfort zone and give it a go. Opening doors to new experiences begins with a bit of discomfort about what we’ll find when we step through. But I have yet to have it slammed in my face.
My nephew teaches Spanish, and goes to Spain every summer to guide students on an immersion experience for several weeks. I think immersion is my own next step towards competency in another language. French is the likely candidate since I’ve been most consistent with it, but really any place that would have me sounds like a great candidate to me. Don’t we owe it to ourselves and those we may interact with to step out of the corridor we’ve been settling for and open some doors?
When we dabble in anything we never develop the calluses earned through grinding it out. An athlete knows when another athlete has put the work in just by looking at them. A native speaker may appreciate us meeting them halfway by attempting a few words in their language, but would delight in a full conversation at natural speed with someone who put the work in to master it. To reach that point is something to aspire to on this road to becoming something more in our brief go with living. Life should be ever expansive as we grow into our potential. Tu ne serais pas d’accord ?
