I can’t help but feel that the therapists I’ve trusted have opinions on what I tell them.
Judgements about who I am.
They will deny it, flatly.
It’s their professional imperative to do so.
But it’s also a direct denial of their humanity.
I hate the pretense.
Tonight, I got rid of books.
Not just any books. All my business books. The ones on how to run a businesses better. The ones on innvovating your way to the top of the pyramid, the market, the consumer’s mind. The ones on entrepreneurial dilemmas and self-discovery in the name of the almighty dollar. The ones on managing people and bosses and boards. The ones on paring it all down to just the essentials and what matters (assuming it’s measurable) most.
Yep. All of them. Even the ones on managing up and down and sideways.
Good To Great
The Little Blue Book of Advertising
The Making of Manager
High Output Management
Built To Last
Behind the Cloud
Trialblazer
Spreadable Media
Essentialsim
The Coaching Habit
Growth Mindset
Let My People Go Surfing
The Silo Effect
The Resilient Enterprise
Googled
Even the great Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last and Start With Why.
Why?
Because reading them was like trying to learn how to ride your horse by watching a movie of someone who is not you riding a horse that is not yours. Or understanding how Rocky Road Ice Cream tastes by listening to someone eat a Rocky Road Ice Cream Cone. Like trying to comprehend the meaning of colors when you are blind.
After dinner, we traded starfucker stories by the fireplace.
I hate starfucker stories.
They’re proof of your smallness no matter who comes out on top.
Six months ago I got “laid off.”
To be honest, it felt more like a firing.
The team didn’t like me. They were either not mature enough for me, or I was not wise enough for them.
They heard very little of what I said. And gave me no credit for what I did.
An internal survey made it clear there was no trust between us.
My leadership team wasn’t much help. They relied on management philosophies that are popular these days about coaching.
It was not just awful for me.
Other leaders often came to me in tears. And most of the key players didn’t make it a year, either quitting, getting exited, or pushed into roles they weren’t hired for. Almost no one seemed happy.
And it was no fun.
Some things just don’t work out.
The shelves are lined with voices frozen in wood
Turned out covers scream for attention
Touch me
Open me
Bring my tongue to life with your inner voice; your inner ear
Take me into your mind
Where I will become part of you
Carried like an ember of memory
An invented life lived in dimensions that cannot be measured
Like love and hate and sorrow and elation.
There are so many speaking to me
Too many to hold onto any of them
Who has time for all these makers
Lovers, murderers, friends, teachers, thinkers, predictors, nurses, reconteurs
I resist the feeling that my own story is diminished
By this ocean of words
But I can’t stand too long
Without feeling like it’s vain and useless
To throw my own wooden voice
On this store of Babel
Most years, our Christmas card — I mean, Holiday card — is a multi-photo, multi-page extravagant affair.
Included, free of charge, is my attempt at giving people an idea in writing of what the year was like and how our mental framework has developed. It also serves as an invitation to our friends to come visit us and share their stories and lives with us.
It’s normally about a paragraph long and it’s a serious invite though few take us up on it.
I work hard on it to make sure it doesn’t come off as a humble-brag. I’m not sure it’s always successful in that way, but I don’t think it comes across like the “Christmas Letter” that gets folded into so many other cards. It’s not a full page list of milestones achieved by the kids. And I know I successfully avoid the cliches and tropes usually found in these things that amounts to a newsletter that comes off as a desperate record of suburban middle-class American life.
It’s also, traditionally, not just a card with some pictures and the pre-written copy from the staff at Minted: “Here’s to Cheer”; “Wishing You A Merry”; “Joy To The World — And You!”.
Except this year.
This year, frankly, has been too complex to find words for. Job loss. A broken sister. Slower walks up the steps for my mother-in-law. Financial fears after the arrival of a tax bill. A realization about our age and our long-term prospects. Social insecurity about the world we moved to. A decision that a career had ended and anger about it spilling into everyday things like loading the dishwasher and folding laundry. An understanding that we never had a real vision for the future and now we don’t have as much future to work it out.
So this year, when I sat down to do the card, I just didn’t have the energy to find optimism.
And I let the pictures do the talking.
Which is to say, our card is just a select set of Instagram posts in cardboard format with pre-written copy from the staff at Minted: Wishing You A Great 2024; Liam, Grady, Heather, Malachy.
That’s it.
I love my kids. I love my wife. We are better off this year than last. We are lucky.
But I really don’t know that I have much more to say about it.
So… no poetry in the card.
Self-reflection is a waste of time if all you’re doing is looking.
I talked to my eldest son about reading tonight. About books. Turns out he’s a reader.
I asked what he might be into next. He confessed to having some trouble with some late Kerouac someone had given him.
I said maybe he should try something else. Books can be returned to. We talked about Rushdie and Marquez. But those are big books. Great but big. And he’s got a lot of commitments — a play he’s in, a film he’s trying to make, a guitar he’s trying to master.
So I said, maybe a short story or two.
He’s going to give some Tillie Olson a try (“Here I Stand Ironing”), maybe O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.”
Afterwords, I thought about Raymond Carver. I’d recently been grousing about the misogyny of some of his stories, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have something to say. Something beautiful.
I pulled this off the shelf, “A Small Good Thing.” It pulled my heart out of my chest and said, Look, look at this. This is yours. Don’t just take care of it. Take care of it in others.
Now I’m going to run lines with my younger son. He’s M-Beth in the middle school fall show.
Every day I plant a seed. I never know what’s going to grow from it. A tree. A weed. A flowering vine. But every day I get up is a day I am planting. And if I plant well, and I tend to it over time, the most amazing things can grow. Redwoods that will live longer than me. An elm that will take care of me in my age. A cypress that will stand against the wind and time. Violets and clover that I can lay in to watch the clouds from.
I can plant with anger or love or indifference or intention and care, but I’m breathing, I’m planting something to add to the garden of my life.
The longer I live the more chance I have to see the things I plant today offer what they to the world. But even when the days grow shorter, it’s still worth it. To plant. To imagine what a sprout may do.
And yeah, I’m lucky enough to live in a place — most of the time — where the ground is fertile and ready to give. To try. It’s not that way for all.
So I’m not squandering my days. No fucking way.
I planting every day I got.
I once had a team that could lead itself. They just didn’t know it.
It only took someone to outline what they were already doing in a map form.
It wasn’t hard. A conversation, a morning of thought, a few more conversations.
Then, a short show, and a few concrete things that they could do to get it going — things they’d always wanted to do.
I’ve also had a team that didn’t want to be led. That already knew what they wanted and didn’t want anything else.
After being introduced to people who could teach them new skills, they’d say: We didn’t really talk about anything except careers.
They’d be invited to pitch ideas, but would complain they weren’t included in projects.
They’d kavetch about workload, but protest bitterly at the hiring of people to help.
They’d tell people they didn’t know where they were going, but never tried to go in directions that were pointed to.
They wanted to be given directions, but not when it they were inconvenient to follow.
Some teams get it. Some teams just hold everyone back, starting with themselves.
Hotel rooms. Planes. People talking in whispers at breakfast tables across rooms.
Dressed for success they are looking at you.
Shoes and pants and belt buckles.
You just want to go home.
But you go on because you must.
You just didn’t imagine yourself in a business desert.
And now you know why people retire early.
Why they just sell it all and leave.
You wish you’d never started that instagram account, because the life that smiles there doesn’t really exist.
You are in foreign territory. Foreign even to yourself.
Directionless.
But moving anyway. Helpless to stop it all.
Afraid of what’s next.
There are so many ways to talk.
But we think of talking without thought and rely on our mouthes too much.
We say nothing, filling the air with sounds that we think have meaning yet like trees in a forest, go unheard.
Syllables pile up like trunks on the earthy floor eventually burying our intended with our intentions.
I wish I’d paid attention sooner
So I could use my hands and arms and back to say more of what I waned you to hear.
Now I work in desperate silence trying to clear the way.
Tears and sweat are full of words - I love you - and drop freely from my body.
Will they find their way to you through the scrabble of wood I have so carelessly put between us?
I must work and hope and keep my senses open
To any sign beyond all hearing.
I wish you could see you the way I do.
I wish you could see how the gray streaks in your once pure red Scottish/Viking hair says I know who I am because I’ve seen a few things — while still calling me forward with sexy self-posession.
I wish you could hear your laugh peeling across the house like a beautiful river of love that refreshes from the ear through all of me.
I wish you could see the freckles on your calves making me swoon a little inside with old and deep desire that wants to spring forward to meet your lips.
I wish you could see the way a wink from you across a room hits like an arrow to the heart and makes me feel like the only one in the room.
That you could see how your hands folded on the table before me hold me to calm the waters within.
How the sunlight flashes in your smile and lights up the sky.
How you bring forth the best in moments that are driving us all mad.
How despite your twitching dreams your marine eyes open to the morning with the clarity of good dreams.
How even under the armor of your anger formed in the fires of expectations and needs unmet, your tenderness breathes in tears and finds its way through even the smallest spaces, to big to be imprisoned by even the most airtight skin.
Yes, I wish you could see you the way I do. See what I see. Feel what I feel. When I see you so you’d know that you are a star that shines even in daylight. A center of gravity for good that I am happy to circle until I die.
Witnessed someone get fired in the co-working space today. A tough “manager” convo followed by tears. (So now I’ve seen that.)
The saddest thing was the “manager-speak” which was impersonal and plastic-y. We pretend that stripping ourselves down to “facts” and “observations” and “structured talking points” that we are making it easier and somehow being more truthful.
We are just setting aside our humanity to make ourselves more comfortable with our actions.
In my opinion, this is also Buddhism’s gift to business. But not one of the better gifts.
My sister called me last night.
She’s going through a lot of difficult change. Divorce. Jobless-ness. Homeless-ness. Cancer.
The harder part of it all are the deeper changes these circumstances are forcing her through. What she thought she was. What she actually is. What she thinks she should be. What kind of time she actually has left and what that means.
She’s making great progress but you wouldn’t know it from the deadwood tone she has over the phone.
I encourage her. Note what she’s done in the face of such difficult challenges. I tell her that while she may not like all the choices she has in front of her, at least she has choices. And many of them are very good and of her own creating.
Then I say, reach out. Call people. Share your feelings. Connect. Don’t give in to self-pity. Or give up on yourself.
She didn’t really want to hear what I had to say. It got a little rough. So, afterwards, I found myself feeling lonely and upset about our talk.
I began to think about who I can call to share and connect with. It turns out my circle is quite small. Old sponsors, close family, an old friend.
It didn’t take long to call through the list.
How did the circle come to be so small?
I reach out to my sister before I hit the hay.
Look, I text, I know that call wasn’t so great. I know it’s hard. You’re making great progress. I just worry that you’re letting some old thinking block you from going farther. But even if it’s hard, I want you to call me when you can. Or need to. Because I love you and I’m in your corner.
On Instagram everyone’s got a life that looks like a fantastic vacation.
Smiling kids on boats. Happy parents on beaches. Look! There’s grandpa on a ski lift and grandma’s zip lining over the gorge! And our next door neighbors, the ones who fight every night? They’re clinking glasses at the Rosewood in Montecito where a room is $2500 a night. Meanwhile, my therapist is visiting distant buddhas in the green lush jungles that even Indiana Jones doesn’t know about.
Concerts. Sunsets. Ancient and obscure ruins (the more obscure the better). Bars on top of castles and piano players on the streets of New York. Saunas under Icelandic volcanoes. Fireworks over Mumbai and the twinkling lights of Hong Kong architectural gems.
And on and on.
All backgrounds for happy, smiling people who have fortunes to spend and no cares in the world.
We’ve all seen them. We’ve all made them.
And honestly, who can keep up with anything but a quick like and lazy heart emoji.
Here’s the truth: A few years ago, we wrote down on the vacations we wanted to take with our kids.
We had 10 of them.
Everything from a Civil War tour of the East Coast to a drive in a Jeep around the Great Lakes visiting lighthouses that tried to warn mariners to stay away.
Trips we wanted to take with the kids before they grew too old to hang with us, but still young enough to make an impression they’d remember fondly in their old age when we are dead and gone.
But today — well, today, it was clear to me that while we’ve done a good number of them, we’re likely never going to get through them all.
For whatever reason, that didn’t make me sad.
In fact, I thought, THANK GOD we’ll go to our graves with something undone. Something unfinished. Something left to wish we’d been able to do more, but also make us aware of the beauty of what we did do.
Including sitting at the dinner table laughing at poop jokes and listening to a kid explain dating in high school in 2023 and hearing about the play a coach made just because “I got an arm, Dad.”
Times when the phone doesn’t work or it’s been put away and, even if I wanted, I couldn’t take a picture of it and make look cool and rich with some stupid filter.
Fuck it. Rant over.
I took my wedding ring off the other night.
It’s a simple platinum band with the question “Pie?” on one interior side and the answer “Yes.” on the other.
Heather put it on my wedding finger on May 14, 2005.
I’ve taken it off here and there — once for an X-ray machine thing, once because, well, I can’t remember — but it’s been on my hand almost continuously since.
I’ve never really think much about it when it happens. It comes off and goes back on so quickly.
But last night, there was an itch so I decided to take it off and give myself a scratch.
It was hard to get off. I had to really work it over my knuckle with a slow twist and pull.
it was clear my body and my life had grown literally around the promise and commitment it represented.
The impression that had been created by years of wearing it was deep and noticeable, something that woudl take some time to disappear if it were not on my hand every day..
And it did not seem free or lighter with its absence, but more like my hand was missing something.
Not something weighty, but something important and true — and comfortable.
Something I would not know if Heather had not said yes at top of the Beekman in New York so long ago, or stuck with me through all my foolish words and actions.
Something I would not know if I hadn’t trusted myself to ask her and opened myself up to sharing everything with another, even the dark and ugly parts that I could barely look at myself.
I could’ve waited until May 14 of this year to celebrate all that has been good that this space made by the ring represented, but that seemed like a long time.
And so I got up and kissed my beautiful freckled red-headed wife in the chair where she sat watching a TV show neither of us will remember tomorrow.
My dad suggested I take a Second City Improv class because all the ad creatives he knew took classes there. His theory was that I’d somehow parlay my way into a useful job by hobnobbing in the world of “Yes and.”
Though the first class I went to had one crazy-eyed woman from Leo Burnett in it, the group was mostly made up by people who wanted to be standup comics (it was that era).
During introductions, these would-be standups made kooky faces and modulated their voices like that somehow would make whatever they were saying “funny.”
They rolled their eyes when the older woman teaching the class said the point wasn’t to be funny, but to play and find something unexpected. “Funny” was all they had on their minds.
We did some work in a circle and it was quickly clear that they we’re very sure if they just talked over everyone else that we’d all start cracking upThen someone, out of nowhere, got on all fours and started acting like a dog. They barked. They scratched. They lifted legs. About a third of the class got down and copied it. I looked around. Almost all of the comedians were standing there like frozen posts looking around. They couldn’t believe what they were being asked to do. Terrified, indignant, judgey.
I looked from them to the dogs rolling and baying on the floor at my knees.
I asked myself: If I came here to just stand around like these jokers and not put everything I had into it, I’d never get anything out of it.
So I got down on all fours and started sniffing someone’s ass - like a dog does when they meet another dog - while hopeful standups looked around plaintively for help.
Still remember that moment 35 years after the fact.
My dreams take twists and turns depending on what’s happening in my life.
Lately, there’ve been a few about moving the family around to keep them safe with the specter of putting them in more peril by forcing change. A few others have been about traveling with lost luggage and missing tickets and going anyway. In one, I was given inedible food that I wanted to spit out but couldn’t find a place to get rid of it in an airport.
Makes me wonder what my father’s dreams were like when he in the midst of crisis. What twists and turns did his mind take behind closed lids in his final nights.
I don’t know why I wonder these things.
But I do.
On the boat, when I was moving the snorkel gear, the lunch tin spilled open and the gluten-free sandwich I’d requested special for you fell onto the deck floor.
Without looking, I could feel your jaw set and your teeth grind.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Later on the curving beach, with the boat 30 yards away, you said I’d made it about myself. That I didn’t think of you first. Because I started with “I didn’t know” and “I didn’t know” isn’t about taking care of you, but taking care of me.
The sand floor of the beach shimmered through the clear Kauai’i waters like a school of sliver dollars darting in a blue glass.
I made no mea culpa because what is there to say? My intentions are meaningless. Any explanation or words I use to pull it apart and say my truth will just be heard as a defense. A defense of me. And who I am. And how much I care. A reflexive reflection of the selfish animal I am, the man who doesn’t think of his wife first. The man who makes everything all about himself.
Silently I looked back at the small pontoon boat lined with tourists in bathing suits. Our two boys worked their feet into fins, on their way to us.
20 years ago, I wondered, is this how “I didn’t know” was understood? Would your observation have been the same as the one you have today? Have we really come this far from where we started?
“It’s fine,” you said pulling down your mask. “You just don’t take care of me the way I want you to. You never have.”
Then you splashed into the water like a mermaid and made your way back to the place where the tin fell and this conversation began with a simple, “I didn’t know.”
I stood in the shallows, jungle behind me, wondering how 20 years came together to make this moment, a moment where my intentions were so unseen and I have no where to go but back to the boat that I thought we were in together.
