I spent the day thinking about Martha and pondering what I might write about in light of the latest member of the clan, Lewis Amzi Hickman, joining us some 72 hours earlier.

What happened instead was that I read various communications from Martha. The subject matter of these was so varied and interesting (to me) that I felt called to make a list — an annotated list of five artifacts that came into view for me that day:

1. The information about the Wicker family came from a set of essays she wrote about our (Martha’s, Pat’s and my) eight great-grandparents. Here is how the Wicker essay begins:

The Wicker line of our family arrived from Devonshire, England, in the form of William Wicker (b. 1693) around 1710. He hoped to settle in Roxbury MA, but he was a Baptist and the Puritans reportedly did not care to have such a person in their midst. An officer of some authority (I’m not clear on what sort of legal system was in place) advised him to look for opportunities elsewhere. Apparently he travelled west; his name is on the charter of the town of Leicester, MA, which he had a role in founding and where he lived out his days.

Our humble beginnings in the land of the free!

2. Ever the archivist, Martha would share with us artifacts from our family history at various times — old letters, drawings, photos. From an email from Martha to Pat and me:

Today I was looking through a bookcase for a music album and (it was a sort of mixed collection of items on the shelf) I found an old music notebook. What should it have in it but Mom’s own notation of “It Was a Lover and His Lass” as sung by Marna and herself. Apparently I persuaded her to write it down at some point.

The song is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Our mom and her sister both had very fine and complementary singing voices.

3. I came across the playlist Martha curated entitled “Music Mom Played.” We were all familiar with the repertoire that Mom would render on the William Knabe console piano in our living room. Martha had, at her own initiative, scoured the internet to locate artists who played this or that tune in a style and tempo close to how she remembered our mom playing.

Martha selected Balazs Szokolay’s interpretation of a Bach C minor prelude, and for a prelude in C major Wilhelm’ Rubsam’s rendering came closer to how Mom played it. Andrea Bacchetti. Angela Hewitt. Janos Sebesteyen. Mary Shields. Keith Jarrett. Cyprien Katsaris — over a dozen pianists, twenty one tunes in all.

Who knows how long this took Martha, visiting digital music libraries and YouTube clips to find the “most like Mom” interpretation. I remember her exclaiming that it was a joyful process.

4. It appears to me that whatever the subject matter, Martha’s mind swept up all the information she could and allocated time to give new ideas some thoughtful reflection. Here is an excerpt from a piece she wrote dated Easter, 2023:

I first encountered the term “responsibilization” in the context of social work theory, as copy editor for an academic journal. So I don’t know a lot about how it may have originated or how other disciplines may use it.

But in the context in which I encountered it, in anti-sanist literature, it described a power imbalance between distressed individuals (the “mentally ill”) and authorities in medicine and government. Rather than acknowledging and addressing any structural causes of distress, authorities defined the cause to be an illness, making individuals responsible for effecting their own cure by subjecting themselves to medication, behavior modification, shock treatments, etc. In other words, although the causes of distress may have been structural, complex, and substantially not of the individual’s making, the solution was off-loaded onto the individual, protecting the system from change.

For me, this is a fabulous example of an idea that one can not un-think. This was one of a set of draft ideas she sent me. The title of another was “Capitalism as a Rouge Technology,” which deserves it own discussion.

I will just say here that Martha was never an agent of alarm, nor was she an activist in the conventional sense. I have described her thinking as “post-conventional.” There is the way most people see things — and there is Martha’s take. I have always been enriched by this part of her.

5. We siblings valued her wise counsel over the years, and we would tell her. She would only admit to being a good listening ear. One always felt seen, heard, and validated. Her writing is similarly engaging, her voice unpretentious, her sentences crafted with unusual care. One of the last essays she shared with me was titled “On Growing Old.” In it, she challenged the notion that old age must be characterized in a certain way, and that we should accept our decline across the board.

What other gifts lie hidden in growing old? The aging mind finds it more challenging to make decisions and nearly impossible to multitask. The aging body wearies and aches. It can be hard to stay focused and also hard to quickly shift focus. This can make it difficult to replicate the linear efficiencies that are conventionally valued, whether in the study, yard, kitchen, craft room, or elsewhere.

But I have challenged myself, and invite others, to withhold judgment and instead look for the virtues in being creatively, enjoyably unproductive: taking massive amounts of time and care to accomplish just a little; wandering from and coming back to tasks; making missteps, undoing, and redoing; starting and not finishing — even planning but never starting. Sometimes I feel in this happy, freewheeling, accepting approach a unique and unfamiliar joy, as if meeting my own dear child self on the path.

Her prose is full of surprises, such as that last phrase.

I could go on. I was looking for a particular early memory she wrote somewhere about her early interest in rocks — each with their distinctive color, texture and heft; each with their own story about where they were formed, how they moved thither, and what happened en route.

I have presented only five sample artifacts.

But know, the full list is long.

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In this case, it is Lewis. Soon he will come into one of our long series of days, and will see everything for the first time without any words or sense of self to establish the limits or boundaries of anything he experiences. On top of that, he changes everything for us. He is the embodiment of change itself.

The mother-to-be is preparing. Midwife and the support team are at the ready. Supplies to the home have kept up a steady flow. Grandparents are in place and helping as they can to assemble and organize baby paraphernalia, cut the grass, run errands.

Lots of doing going on. But I am also noticing an interior shift. I can only speak for myself. The shift is profound yet subtle.

I have noticed the thinness of time. We are here, as we have always been. He is somewhere else. Suddenly he will be before our eyes, like life’s greatest magic trick. Presto.

I feel an emptying. I don’t know of what. Best I can describe, it is a sense of a tiny sphere of void somewhere in the midst of us as I move through the day. A baby-sized place holder, empty but moving, gesticulating, shaping the air that he will occupy.

I hear the sound of an internal blackboard being erased. Some of us remember that sound of the block of felt eraser being drawn back and forth across the dull black surface of the chalk board, smearing the lines, the equations, the images — rubbing them all to the ever-fainter residue of dust. Am I preparing for a new lesson? It is as though I want to receive this newcomer with an openness, a newness that might not even have words yet, or ever.

Lately I have been taking note of what others are writing about children and the people that babies become. There is a Millennial columnist “Viv” whom my daughter Molly likes. Viv writes a critique of a phenomenon she calls “ambitious parenting.”

It is a fabulous piece written with wit, humor and honesty. Here she reflects on a contradiction in her generation:

It’s puzzling! It’s strange. It seems we all share the same posts about how sad it is that childhood seems to be going away. How a delimited existence is a dim thing for a child. How Gen-Z is all fucked up because they never learned how to go outside… And yet. And yet. We share these posts, and then happily go back to discussing our plans for carefully delimiting our future children’s existences.

There are no formulas, and contradictions abound. Related to this theme is the challenge of raising children in the Information Age, with a lot of hand-wringing about technology.

The tools of the Information Age — computers, networks, the internet, and digital communication — allow us, for better or worse, to connect with any one, any where, all the time about anything.

And anyone at any age can avail themselves of the digital device. It can be the size of a juice box and contains more computing power than was available in 1969 to the entire Apollo space program.

Molly shared with me this post on X by Matt Bateman.

I strongly recommend giving a 4yo an iPad, strictly for the child’s sake. Details in next reply.

As a provocative post, it hits all the bumpers (to use a pinball machine analogy). But he presents what seems to me like a plausible argument which he laid out in his subsequent Substack:

Higher Ground's Friday Notes

A sensitive period for texting

Happy Friday, everyone…

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2 years ago · 32 likes · 7 comments · Matt Bateman

His argument is specific and nuanced. The salient point is that he set up the iPad to offer his child three specific and limited “affordances” — she can take pictures, type notes, and text with family and a small group of friends. That’s it. He tempered the tool to benefit the specific user.

What I found interesting, and somewhat alarming, were the sheer number of comments. Some were laudatory (e.g., “This is the best take I’ve seen about limiting bad screen time and maximizing good screen time”). A few expressed curiosity, but many were surprisingly critical (e.g. “I’ve heard some dumb things in my life, but this is top 10,” and “This guy hates the future generations,” and the classic “Idiot.”)

My favorite exchange:

His argument for the benefits of this approach raises the interesting point about helping the child adapt to the specific time in which she has come to live.

In a world of people bent on taking their own anxiety about technology and introjecting it as full blown misanthropy and civilizational alienation in every child, give your child the humanistic gift of loving the information age.

It is difficult to imagine a corollary in the previous ages of human development — parental anxiety about exposure to stone, or bronze, or iron.

Lewis already has what I would call an auspicious beginning. His starting place will be filled with a network of amazing people, the center of which is his mother who has, I can say with total objectivity, all the qualities of a fabulous Mom.

As he grows he will adapt to a world that we can barely imagine. How will he and his peers balance time in the digital world with time in the one with the blue sky? How will he hone the skills of information literacy1 in the age of truth-bending?

I have no idea. But he will. I believe they all will.

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He was an unremarkable man, large, middle-aged, with a fleshy face and a bearing that was convivial especially when the topic was close to home. I remember only one line from that evening — his response to the question about the secret to his success. His delivery was at once prophetic and self-explanatory, obvious:

“I think about money all the time.”

I was only beginning to think about what sort of adult life I wanted to fashion for myself, but I do remember making a mental note: Well, I don’t want to be like that!

At that point, however, I didn’t reflect on the obvious philosophical follow-up question: is there anything you do want to think about?

Recently I installed a mezuzah on our door frame. For those of you who don’t know, a mezuzah is a small piece of parchment inscribed with specific biblical passages from Deuteronomy (the fifth book of the Jewish Torah) that is rolled up in a container and affixed by many Jewish households to their door frames in conformity with Jewish law and as a sign of their faith.1

For some reason, the houses we lived in the past decade all came with mezuzahs pre-installed. Seemed like we should have one.

Being a Goy — a non-Jew, a Gentile — I got a lot of things wrong. Written on parchment from a kosher animal, written in Hebrew with a quill pen, by a specially trained and devout scribe? I’m 0 for 3 so far. I did, however, say the prayer — in Hebrew — prior to affixing the case at the proper height on the right side as you enter, so there’s that. And yet, I could be accused of cultural appropriation, even religious blasphemy.

So, why this ritual, albeit conducted in a non-kosher manner? I see it as a nod to the Jewishness that is infused in this otherwise Protestant family. The children from my first marriage are Jewish. Our daughter Molly’s anonymous sperm donor is an Ashkenazi Jew. My wife Busy’s surname, Graham, morphed from the Austrian Großbaum, sometime in the early 20th century.

In performing my due diligence about the significance of the mezuzah, I learned something about choosing what to focus on — the value of thinking about something “all the time,” or even some big part of the time.

Below is one of the passages from Deuteronomy that is scribed onto the mezuzah. I don’t share it here with any particular religious interest or fervor — that’s not the point. The passage is a testimonial to the power of training your focus on a bigger picture. Something transcendent. Sort of like getting perspective on “what it’s all about.” Like taking a slow, deep, cosmic breath.

Here is the practice as described in Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 5 through 9:

⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.2

⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.

⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

⁹ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.3

Whatever is most important: Keep it in your heart. Bring it up with your children while resting, walking, last thing at night, first thing in the morning. Tie a ribbon round your finger as a simple memory aid. It’s your sixth chakra between your eyebrows — associated with inner wisdom, clarity of thought. Think of it as you enter your home, and pass between rooms in the course of the day.

So. What can I think about all the time? I would like to think I have a choice. If it’s money, fame or fortune, I sincerely doubt that at any point I will be able to say to myself “that’s enough; I’ve got what I need.”

I am thinking that if I worship these things, I will always want more. Same for worshipping pleasure, youth, power.

“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships,” said David Foster Wallace. He goes on to say:

The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

In other words, to think about it all the time.

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I find myself looking back as well, to when our daughter was born in 1994–and those early years. I remember the Siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces was in its second year. The first Information Superhighway Summit was held in Washington, D.C. at which government officials, industry leaders, and academics discussed the future of the internet. The Dow had yet to top 4,000.

But all of that was background noise. At Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington DC there was a new person, yet unnamed, who invited all our attention. When she wasn’t nursing or sleeping, her darting eyes were scanning the new world with what seemed like focus and deliberation. Hours into life she was already collecting data.

When it was time to take our baby home, the checkout nurse stopped by the room. She had a brusque but efficient bearing. She was filling in a form on a clipboard, and asked for the baby’s name. We had contenders, but hadn’t settled on one.

“You don’t have a name? You need one before you leave here. If you don’t, you’re going to have to visit the DC vital records office. The long lines, the bureaucracy, they take up time you never get back. You don’t want to deal with the DC vital records office. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

We took out our short list of names and were able, in a matter of minutes, to take home Molly Graham Hickman.

Bureaucracy would come up again at the time of baptism. We thought it would be fitting to make a pilgrimage to Wilmington, Delaware, and have Molly christened at our old Episcopal church.

I recently came across this letter from my mother, which recounts her effort to scope out a venue. Here she is writing to the Reverend William Lane at Christ Church:

Dear Bill Lane:

The clergy have always seemed fond of the concept of joy; therefore, I thought I’d report that I saw some of it a couple of weeks ago on the faces of my family when my son’s baby was baptized at the Cathedral Church of St. John.

In offering early on to scope out the Wilmington churches for this Washington, D.C. branch, my first call was to you since Christ Church is where I’ve been trying to find my way back to the denomination. You told me about the necessity for current parish membership as a prerequisite for baptism.

Ditto, my call to St. Andrew’s in which “vineyard” I’d worked the kitchen, the choir stalls, the classroom, the board room and the lectern. Hardly someone who had just wandered in from the street - although, come to think of it, that might have been an advantage in that particular church.

Moving on to the Cathedral [Church of St. John]. Canon Kerr agreed immediately to the christening and I was mightily relieved not only because I could report good news to my family but also because I was spared a perhaps terminal case of rancor over the church that preaches individualized ministry and inclusion and then gets its feet tangled in frivolous legalities. As a clergy friend parodies: “Like a mighty glacier/Moves the church of God.”

All this said, I do like that grand old parish of yours out there where many of my oldest friends are pillars - and I intend to darken its doors now and then!

Sincerely,

Janet Hickman

I am sure our family will not confront any ecclesiastical hindrances this time around. And as for the name, a front runner was selected months ago by the mother-to-be. (It was her boss’s Sufi grandmother, whom Molly met in Istanbul, who first predicted it was a boy, and went so far as to assign him the name Aziz. With all due respect, Molly has since made other plans.)

We are making the world ready for him, and he is suitably preparing himself for his excursion into this world. He will be lovingly received, attended by every blessing.

There is an incipient garden plot in our back yard, maybe ten by twenty feet, demarcated by landscape timber. Over the years it has hosted onions, tomatoes, green beans and such. It has been fallow and I had no plans for its use. Yet there I was recently, garden spade in hand, turning over and over rich shovelfuls and busting them up. Where we came from, up north, the ground was compact and rocky, and what soil strata existed was thin. This land holds more promise.

I will start small, maybe a few rows of wildflowers. Something new in the furrows to echo the new delivery of life upon which our love and attention will come to focus.

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There is a profound suggestion here: that the corvid brain might be capable of empathy, of imagining what is going on in the mind of another being and thinking about the impact of their own actions on others.

Researcher Nicky Clayton with captive Eurasian Jays. Photo: Trevor Ray Hart

Empathy can be a helpful human trait. We used to think it was exclusively human, and now we know that it appears in many species, even in a bird brain.

With empathy we humans can connect, derive pleasure from reading books and watching sports, hold meaningful dialogue, and share perspectives and thoughts. And with empathy, we can predict the impact of events and words on others.

We practice empathy every day. We can feel when it is present in the conversations we have with others – when we share information, stories and opinions. And we can feel when it is missing, for instance, in encounters that leave us feeling intimidated, ignored or humiliated. We can feel it missing from much of our political dialogue, certainly. The national tenor of conversations, debates, and dialogue is unprecedentedly shrill and mean.

The moment when civility is absent can be disheartening and frightening for those who don’t understand that the other side has taken off the gloves and has moved suddenly from friendly conversation to what I would term hostile zeal – a kind of assertion of a point of view that is forceful, uncompromising and uncaring about the impact on others.1

It is this phenomenon — the rise and acceptance of hostile zeal — that might compromise a foundational tool of civilization: civil discourse.

Civil discourse is the engagement in conversation intended to enhance understanding. We introduce children early on to the art of civil discourse. It starts with some basic ideas or rules that we all know. “Use your inside voice,” “Slow down so I can understand you,” and “Don’t interrupt; let your sister finish her sentence,” are examples we might hear around the house. In school we might hear “Who haven’t we heard from?” and “Let’s see if we can talk this through.” You get the idea.

These kinds of statements aim to ensure that:

1. voices are heard,

2. people and ideas are respected,

3. tone and force are proportionate to the situation and

4. interpersonal connections are preserved or enhanced.

From these foundational values have evolved applications at every grade level: elementary school students trained in conflict resolution skills for the playground; social skills workshops in middle school to teach empathy and encourage self-control; the use of restorative justice practices in high school; a focus at all ages on mindfulness and centering as a way to decrease stress and build resiliency.

Clearly, we value these things in schools and homes: inclusion, respect for people, and a sense (through empathy) of the appropriateness of tone and force in different social situations.

We also value, as a nation, the robust debate, the open sharing of views, and the validity of vigorous disagreement on issues.

Yet in public discourse we seem to lack the wherewithal to talk constructively about our difference of views.

I found this little diagram called “Ways of Talking” in connection with my work as an organization development specialist for Human Resources at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the late 1900s:

Most people are familiar with the process on the right-hand side of the model; we are taught through the educational process to advocate and defend our point of view. Many professions are siloed into areas of expertise. You have a problem. I have knowledge and experience. Your role is to listen. To me. Society reinforces this talent (of expressing opinions) through the celebration of one-sided takes, whether coarse, indignant, and simplistically certain, as in the ecosystem that followed Rush Limbaugh, or polished, ironic, and researched, as exemplified by John Oliver.

Advocate/Compete/Convince can, in extreme cases, be manifested as an act of violence, causing the person on the receiving end to feel humiliated, flee for safety, or fight back.

In one sense, the Advocate/Compete/Convince approach, and resolving the conversation by power (or intimidation and abuse) is easy and efficient (for the advocate) as long as the advocate doesn’t care about – or see the relevance of, or have the skills to pursue behaviors that lend themselves to – building relationships with other people.

The approach on the left-side is more nuanced, and less instinctive for many than the right-side path. The behaviors of listening, accepting and trust-building are all derived from an interest in the act of inquiry, which is based on having curiosity as a mindset.

The curiosity mindset is not dramatic. It relishes sharing of viewpoints, not “take downs.” It marvels at the variety of human thinking, not narrow rightness; it is broad, not truncated. It is arguably the result of empathy and imagination.

We need both Advocacy and Inquiry; but while the former is easily grasped, practiced and rewarded, the latter might be in a state of atrophy and in need of rehabilitation.

Maybe we can see the antics of a crow (with her walnut-sized brain, demonstrating empathic thinking and behavior) as a call for all of us to “up our game,” so to speak. Sometimes it feels as if the art of inquiry, and the attendant skills of curiosity and empathy are at risk, even in our conversations.

I believe we can strengthen our empathy and our caring – things many of us learn while young and maybe lose sight of.

We can be better than children, in this regard, and certainly better than crows.

At stake is civil discourse and the benefits that will accrue with our evolved understanding of each other — in the wide, troubled world, and at our own hearth and table.

We close today, Thursday. We move Saturday. There are a lot of moving pieces. A lot of long inner good-byes that don’t have words. I need to call upon a story from my past. To get some perspective. I hope you understand, Gentle Reader.

I wrote an essay in June 1998, after I visited the home of my childhood. Earlier that month neighborhoods in the northern suburbs of Wilmington were subjected to a microburst — a sudden, violent downdraft of air that accompanied a particularly vicious thunderstorm.

A tree fell into the house where my pal John lived when we were young. And the woods behind our old house at 23 Briar Road had been leveled. I visited the site, following a sense of obligation to witness the devastation that had been meted out upon the sylvan backdrop of my childhood.

Here is the essay, edited for length.

Most of the trees I had ever really known as a child were knocked over one night recently, so I went to see what it looked like. These were the woods behind the house where I grew up. Less than a quarter acre, the woods could hardly qualify as a disaster area; but in its compact assembly of mature trees, undergrowth, paths and woodpiles, it contained the stuff of almost a quarter century of activity. I came to the site feeling like an archivist, hunting for a catchment of memory.

I’ll just take a peek. Just to the edge of the house, I thought. Just along the garden.

Something pulled me in, past the edge of the house, in toward what had been the edge of the woods. What had been a lush backdrop of green was gone, decimated, swept, raked over. As when an actual rake, thoughtlessly drawn over a patch of small blossoms, will push over many of them and ruin horribly the uniform spread and tiny altitude of those flowers, so to oaks, and maple and poplar did this recent wind wreak havoc.

Some were standing. I noted them as I drifted in a mix of mourning and fascination toward that woods — moving toward a place at which I would never arrive. Where was the single white rose by the ash tree? The rhododendron? Where was the forest edge? How did a 100mph downdraft remove this precise grove of trees while leaving all the houses around it intact?

A few neighbors in the development behind ours moved slowly across their back yards, gathering and moving branches to one side. They can see me, and I them, because the green is gone. It reminds me of jungle deforestation in the Philippines; whatever lushness there was stops at the edge of human enterprise. Perhaps a hundred feet back across the devastation, the woods suddenly resume, as dense and green as I remember it.

I walked toward the back porch, toward the person moving to greet me, who, I would soon find out, was the owner of 23 Briar Road, Ms. Steele. I introduced myself and explained my mission. She told me the story of that weird and frightful night. Thunder cracked and incessant lightning popped like flashbulbs. The entire family migrated to the basement for safety. Then, in the riot of wind and hail, a seismic thud — a grove of old-growth trees being swiped down in a second.

In the ensuing conversation, we put the woods back together, its history since they moved in, and before we moved out. We watched the neighbors move branches and piles from here to there. Ms. Steele would invite me, my mom, and my children Andy (12) and Hannah (10) to tour the inside of the house, my first view of it in eighteen years.

I never saw the woods for the first time; it was always there. I was six months old in May 1955 when my family moved to 23 Briar Road, and at that point ours was one of two houses on a quarter mile long cul-de-sac off Wilson Road. This development, to which my mom would give the name Briarwood, had, at my earliest memory (circa 1958), only 13 houses, numbered 1, 3, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and ours. The other 10 lots were empty.

Over the course of the next decade the sapling growth would give way, one by one, to houses, but the woods behind us and in the lot to the west of us, remained — sort of a legacy of the forest, orchard and farmland which all this land was before the Great World Wars. This woods, positioned as it was at the end of the cul-de-sac, was exempt from development. It was my backdrop, a canopy, an enclosure, a hug of green. A corner of peace and sustainability, amidst the change of suburban sprawl, of the riotous 1960s, of my own growth, toddler, teen to man.

Year upon year, in much the same way the woods would shake its bare branches against the cold darkness, and hold and bounce sunlight in the summer, or carry the wood thrush call. The Woods just Were, year upon year.

As much as the trees defined the space, I marked the area in my child’s mind by paths and clearings. Here is where woodpile was, and the old hammock, and here between oak and maple we put the new one. The trapeze hung off the slanting red oak, and past that point a path led back to the clearing where the two trees grew together. Way beyond that (and well off our property) was Big Rock, a dark basalt landmark indicating time to turn back.

Directly behind the house there were the four sassafras trees of uniform height, forming a rectangle that invited construction of various forts. From there a path parallel to the fence brought one, within a few steps, to the stables of imaginary horses, a mote, a meeting room, a tunnel behind the viburnum and another clearing where we would spring from the split rail fence and swing off a sweet gum tree branch. This last spot was near the end of the driveway, where stood the tulip poplar – one of the few great climbing trees in the constellation.

This path along the fence followed, we later ascertained, an old drainage ditch which one could follow past the sassafras, past the birch trees, to a low area behind the double tree where, each of Hickman children swear, there once was a small marshy area. I thought there was running water there at one time. Pat remembers salamanders and guppies. That part of the woods, the clearing, was always dense and cool.

The double tree was now on its side, blown down to the northeast along with its companions: two white oaks, the maples, others. The woods was a confusion of snapped trunks, northeast-blown trees, huge rounds of bleached roots clung with light gray and yellowish soil, many taller than I. What remained of the underbrush were a few stems with sparse leaves turned the wrong way. The red oak, which grew at a southwest slant, stood still, all but three stout limbs busted off, and of them only one had leaves to speak of.

Near the trapeze was the spicebush. Dad had shown us children how to spot its oval leaves which, when crushed between your fingers, imparted a sweet smell. That was thirty years ago. I picked one leaf, rolled it in my fingers and kept its fading fragrance in my hand.

Standing in the woods, the echoes of past activities seemed particularly faint, my feet and body particularly large on this stage where so many small events happened: singing with my sisters as we raked leaves; the hammock; the few campfires near the split tree; setting off firecrackers; building the sassafras forts; raking out clearings and paths and passages and meeting rooms and the hideaways; tending the animal graveyard, resting place of beasts wild and domestic, just behind the maple in the yard. The beginning of my nature watching. Naming bird tunes. Noting the color of bark.

There is nothing really to do but reflect, the magic having been completed sometime earlier when I wasn’t looking.

I remembered the trees as footprints where they stood, and as billows where they lived in the air as blended clouds of distinct texture and shape. Even on this sad day, I move around the blasted landscape as I felt I should, a pilgrim coming home.

Ms. Steele and I find some solace in remembering the woods, but the pain is deep, the ruination too fresh. No one was hurt, but the Steeles keep the living room window curtain closed in mourning.

Seventeen years later I paid another visit. Ms Steele was happy to say that trees were coming back. She had the curtains open.

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We were visiting, at her suggestion, Antietam National Battlefield where, 143 years previous, a great and horrible battle took place.

We parked near a forested area, and there were other swaths of trees further out and all around. In some way we were typical tourists. We started at the visitor center, studied dioramas of the landscape and the troop movements, read summaries of the battle, death tolls of wars over the years, and learned a little about what happened in our nation’s history that brought 132,000 men to this site on September 17, 1862.

Exploring outside we approached statues and placards with a kind of slow reverence. I don’t know what it is about a battlefield site, but I wanted to walk carefully, as though the hallowed ground were still and forever wounded. We read each sign, and discussed the issues quietly. We followed a trail across the fields and through a patch of forest, and there came upon a small graveyard. It was well-tended but off the path and slightly hidden in the dappled sunlight.

Molly and I fell into a moment of thoughtful reflection, alternately bending to read a name and standing there, taking in the sober nest of stones.

After a few minutes it occurred to me to ask: “If one of these soldiers could talk to us, what would he say?”

Her reply came quicker than I had anticipated, delivered with a characteristic clarity and decisiveness: “He would ask, ‘What are we doing in Iraq?’”

At that time, the U.S. and its coalition were just beginning year three of the Iraq War (2003-2011). I can’t remember the details of the conversation that followed but it must have touched on the implications of that question, and what it would mean for the poor young man, who perished in 1862, and was now trying to make sense of his country in 2005:

What did I fight and die for? So that our brave nation would send more boys like me overseas to do battle with another poor band of young men? And for what? It’s been nearly a century and a half since all of us here gave “the last full measure of our devotion.” How long can we keep doing this? Have we learned nothing about peacemaking?

Molly is older now, with a career, a community of friends, a home and a child on the way. Sitting with her in church this past Easter Sunday, we heard Pastor Neal open the service: “Find your balance on holy ground. Breathe deeply the breath of life. Be emptied of small concerns.”

For me, I had to quiet the background noise of this new Middle East war with Iran, launched 15 years after the end of the previous war we started in the Middle East with Iraq.

At several points in the service Pastor Neal reflected on the value of community — how we all practice the hard work of love and forgiveness as we live and grow toward the light. He talked about death and resurrection, and the process of “repentance” — which comes from the Greek word meaning “to change one’s mind.” In the religious sense this is more than an academic exercise; this is the heartfelt transformation of one’s mind, attitude and actions.

It can happen. In moments hidden in dappled light. In a moment of kindness to a stranger. In a 100 year-old church. We breathe deeply the breath of life.

We can turn away from where we are headed. The Hebrew word teshuva (which we translate as repentance) is derived from the verb ‘to turn.”

Supply chains are global. The arms business thrives. Oil tankers drift at a sleepy pace across the oceans. The tremors of war are felt in every heart. Some days darkness seems like a growing force.

It is not.

But life is. The seed dies so that the stem might flourish toward the light (to paraphrase Pastor Neal). Then it grows to connect with a thousand other lives in its realm. And it keeps going. Life rejuvenating. Life everlasting.

Maybe peace and community are local things, residing in tangible signs of coexistence such as this intentional congress in a small church in Red Hill, Virginia, and millions of places — religious and secular — where two or three (or more) are gathered and find balance with each other.

If there is a lesson in peacemaking, maybe it is here.

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My sister Pat (two years older than me, and in 12th grade in 1970) had a 1969 white Volkswagen Beetle, which I learned to drive. Trunk in the front, engine in the back. Stick shift. Roll-down windows. Nothing fancy.

Do you remember the miles per gallon of your first car? Of course not. Nobody does (according to my research). That’s because in 1970 it cost about 4 bucks to fill your entire tank. Price per gallon in 1970 was about $0.35.

And this price had been remarkably stable from the end of World War II to 1973. During those decades gasoline prices rose so gradually, one hardly noticed. The shock of 1973 wasn’t just that prices went up — it was that, for the first time in a generation, they moved at all.

What happened? Even a little research on this topic made me feel like I had inhaled too much car exhaust. Proposing a simple explanation for political events in the Middle East is never a good idea. I’ll let Wikipedia summarize the First Oil Crisis:

In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced that it was implementing a total oil embargo against countries that had supported Israel at any point during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began after Egypt and Syria launched a large-scale surprise attack in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories that they had lost to Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War.

So, it all began in 1973, or maybe 1967. Or when the Ottoman Empire after WWI was partitioned by the western European powers and shaped the modern Middle East. Hard to say.

The interruption in the oil supply caused gasoline shortages. Some stations ran out, or rationed gas. There were long lines at the pump. When my 19 year old self in the VW was waiting in line at the Texaco station, I was only aware that “OPEC” was the cause of this faint (in retrospect) disruption in my life. Suddenly my $0.35 per gallon regular unleaded was costing me $0.54.

There was also a stock market crash from January 1973 until December 1974 that I knew nothing about. But I did know I was paying more than $6.50 to fill my tank.

What also went unnoticed was the close of an era — the end of (relatively) cheap and abundant gasoline. Underlying all those post-WWII decades was an invisible system of interdependence. After 1973 the system — now broken — became visible: the U.S. was dependent on foreign oil, the oil-producing nations were asserting their power, using oil supply as a weapon, and the whole postwar economic picture was now seen as fragile and uncertain.

I was only slightly more aware six years later with the Second Oil Crisis in 1979. This time oil production dropped in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. Another summary via Wikipedia:

Oil markets’ reaction raised the price of crude oil drastically over the next 12 months, more than doubling it to $39.50 per barrel [in 1980]. The sudden increase in price was connected with fuel shortages similar to the 1973 oil crisis. In 1980, following the onset of the Iran–Iraq War, oil production in Iran fell drastically. Iraq’s oil production also dropped significantly, triggering economic recessions worldwide.

Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.

What I remember distinctly during this period was how the then Big Three automakers — Ford, Chrysler and GM — all downsized their automobiles, and small, fuel efficient Japanese cars flooded the market. My car at this time was a used, yellow 4-speed 1977 Datsun 1200 sedan. The previous owner had taken out the catalytic converter, so I was getting 43 miles per gallon on the highway — a situation to which I turned a moral blind eye, even when my environmentalist girlfriend at the time broke up with me over this issue.

At this point, it’s hard not to notice the recurring theme of the supply of oil used for political and economic power, and the persistent casting of the usual suspects in the oil drama: Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the U.S.

Jimmy Carter, in his 1980 state of union address1 had this to say:

An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States.

The more things change, the more they are all about oil, am I right?

This was a few years before the term “globalization” was in popular currency. It’s all connected. We all depend on each other and on unencumbered trade with each other.

If something interrupts the oil distribution system — for instance, two tough guys take out a rival mob leader, whose gang controls a key waterway — the world adapts to bring things back to normal. Even now, America is leading the way toward stabilizing global markets. And the automobile industry is fully incentivized to make more electric vehicles (EVs), and make gas cars smaller and more efficient.

Totally kidding. They are not doing any of that.

Federal regulations to encourage electric vehicles have been rolled back. The tax credit for EV purchases ended. The best selling vehicle of any type in the U.S. is the Ford F-Series pickup, and has been for the past 44 years.2 The gas version’s average mile per gallon is 16 city - 21 highway. Their “EcoBoost” model gets 17 and 25.3

By comparison, the most efficient non-hybrid car is the 2025 Honda Civic, which has an average mpg of 33 city - 42 highway.

As of this writing, gas prices are over $5 per gallon in some places. So far no shortages or long lines or odd-even rationing. The economic turmoil generated by this arguably unnecessary war is far more punishing and catastrophic in other places in the world and on other livelihoods and other lives.

As for the tiny ham-fisted leaders of our Executive branch, they would like us to think their “excursion” is going to plan. But as we learned from the oil crises of the past, sometimes a system is invisible until it breaks.

Or someone breaks it.

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Share Meanwhile, Elsewhere by Stewart Hickman

By my reckoning, Francis Hickman lived 10 generations ago, born 1644 in Lambourne Woodlands, Berkshire Parish, Wiltshire, England.

Here is a map of the area showing hills and small towns. And not much else. Lamborne Woodlands (not shown) is a small hamlet 2 miles south of Lamborne and 70 miles (113km) west of London.

Today it is described in Wikipedia as “located on the route of Ermin Way, the Roman road which connected Calleva Atrebatum (today's Silchester) to Glevum (Gloucester). The hamlet is in the triangle formed by the modern B4000 from Newbury to Lambourn and Hilldrop Lane.” (Spelling varies through the ages: Lamborne, Lambourne and Lamborn).

Here is a modern view:

See the triangle? That’s it. Here were born Francis Hickman in 1644 and Elizabeth Chamberlin four years earlier. Both were members of the local Quaker Meeting and were married in 1664,

Around 1684, Francis became one of many fellow countrymen to purchase land from William Penn, to whom King Charles II had in 1681 deeded 45,000 square miles west of the Delaware River. I am uncertain how many acres Francis procured.

Records show that he crossed the Atlantic and arrived in the New World around 1684 with Elizabeth and their children Joseph (age 15), Hannah (12) and Benjamin (8).Together they farmed their land in Chester County.

Early maps of Pennsylvania were spare of detail.

As Penn’s woodland was occupied by “settlers” (as they were referred to), the boundaries were drawn and the owner’s name noted.

I was not able to find my ancestor’s name on the first maps, but other records indicate that the farm was near the present day Westtown Friends School. The property would pass to Benjamin in 1700, where he lived with his bride, Hannah Buffington. Our line is descended from their son, Francis.

Writing this, I am trying to imagine the decision to move, and all the pieces that needed to fall into place, not to mention the emotional side of things. Was the process exciting? Was it traumatic? Was there resistance in the ranks of that young family? Or did they take on each day’s challenges with Quakerly forbearance?

This modern descendant, 341 years later, has no idea.

Our daughter Molly’s baby boy — her first — is due in May, and we decided to move from Silver Spring, Maryland and re-settle in Charlottesville, Virginia where Molly lives to be close at hand to help with raising Lewis (or whomever he looks like when he arrives). There are certainly challenges for two people in their seventies making the 125 mile journey — south of the Potomac River, no less. Still, nothing close to crossing the Atlantic in a wooden boat and arrive to an empty plot of land.

We have more than a few modern advantages:

• Zillow, to help find a rental. Ours is a 5 minute walk to the other side of Belmont Park where Molly lives.

• Costco, where we bought luxuriant quantities of every staple, plus a loaf of cherry fig bread.

• For the physical move, a hale and hearty brother-in-law with a good back and tremendous upper body strength, and a U-Haul truck. Plus crews of young folk in both locations to load and unload.

That we were not moving to avoid religious persecution is an added benefit.

The closest we came to the spirit of our ancestors was perhaps the first meal in our new home — potato leek soup in simple ceramic bowls. Because we had no furniture, we sat happily together on the stairs to the second floor

Just as I imagine our forbearers did.

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In this kind of uncertainty, it is hard to live in the moment. You know, the idea of mindfulness, living in the eternal Now, “Go with the flow,” etc.

I have always been perplexed by this philosophy — the idea that one is best served by being in the moment, viewing life with a kind of detachment, going with the flow. My first exposure to this manner of mental bearing was in high school when my mom introduced to the writing of Alan Watts, the British theologian and philosopher in his essay “Become What You Are,” in his book by the same name:

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever. Called Tao by the Chinese, it is at once the eternally moving and eternally resting.

A few years later, my high school sweetheart gave me a copy of I Ching (The Book of Changes), the ancient Chinese divination text. My King Lear term paper analyzed the main characters in terms of the yin/yang duality. I practiced transcendental meditation in college (along with everybody), studied Eastern religion and philosophy, and learned about Tao, The Way.

Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way and of Virtue), was written as early as the 4th century BCE and attributed to Lao-tzu whose historical existence is a matter of debate. Tao (translated as way, path, channel, path, or doctrine) is “indescribable and transcends all analysis and definition.”1

The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.
The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.
Having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth.
Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching. (Trans. by Jame Legge unless noted)

The written word can not capture the real thing. The workings of the Way are hidden behind what we can observe.

One moves through life in accord with the Tao by practicing humility, simplicity, and detachment.

As I contemplate this idea, it sounds appealing. Living in accord with Tao means freeing oneself from the regrets of the past and from the concerns or fears of the future. All there is, is Now.

Living this kind of detachment as a way of life, however, is more of a challenge for the non-monks among us. Past and future follow us around everywhere - we regret, we plan, we worry, we anticipate, we yearn, we feel the bite of trespasses against us. Any moment in any given day contains more than just “Now.”

Each day we hear how “the stock market” is doing. The Dow is a proxy for economic enthusiasm. A sort of national mood ring. Is the market up? (We’re in the Money) Is it down? (Stormy Weather) Or ambiguous? (It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing)2

But this does not capture the real thing. The Dow is only what is observable, a line on a graph and a number.

On another app I can see the current value of my investments. They are currently down about 6% from their high two months ago.

But this does not capture the real thing either. It is only what is observable.

Situations like what is happening in the Middle East are serious and unsettling. Will the volatility persist? How long will it last before it passes away?

After violence there is peace. After loss there is gain.

What is and what is not create each other. Difficult and easy complement each other. Tall and short shape each other. High and low rest on each other. Voice and tone blend with each other. First and last follow each other. Lao-tzu, trans. Stefan Stenudd, taoistic.com)

Each day I name the things which bring forth my best care and attention. Even in these very words I strive to express my ideas, and I feel the effort of mind and heart to locate and pin down truth and true motive. Maybe I am trying too hard.

The Dow goes down again today, fleecing more of my financial flock by another couple percentage points. But this does not capture the real thing.

The world finds its collective economic footing, for now, in the midst of the chaos brought about by the unforced error of war.

He who displays himself does not shine;
he who asserts his own views is not distinguished;
he who vaunts himself does not find his merit acknowledged;
he who is self-conceited has no superiority allowed to him.
Lao-tzu

The Tao, the Way, asks us to be in the moment; indeed the Way exists in the moment. It asks us to understand that past regrets are not the real thing, that fears of what might come in the future are not the real thing. The Tao asks us to stop striving so much, stop yearning, stop fearing.

There is no guilt greater than to sanction ambition;
no calamity greater than to be discontented with one's lot;
no fault greater than the wish to be getting.
Therefore the sufficiency of contentment is an enduring and unchanging sufficiency.
Lao-tzu

The “sufficiency of contentment.” The quieting of the nervous soul. The finding of peace through focus. Here are some examples of this kind of practice:

• The main character in The Way of the Pilgrim3 (a 19th century Russian story) seeks to discover the practice of “ceaseless praying.” This obscure text was popularized in the U.S. by J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961).

• Hesychasm is a contemplative monastic tradition in the Eastern Christian traditions in which stillness (hēsychia) is sought through uninterrupted prayer.4

• Many meditation practices focus on breathing as a way to keep one centered and in the moment. When the mind wanders (which it does), “return to the breath.”

• The way of seeking the sufficiency of contentment is even in our popular music, beginning arguably with The Beatles. “The Inner Light” is a non-album single released in 1968 as the B-side to “Lady Madonna.” This George Harrison composition and performance draws heavily upon Eastern influences, with lyrics based on a passage from the Tao Te Ching, quoted here:

Without going outside his door, one understands (all that takes
place) under the sky; without looking out from his window, one sees
the Tao of Heaven. The farther that one goes out (from himself), the
less he knows. Lao-tzu

The storm came and went. The Dow ticked higher then lower. The warlords torment others and then they themselves are tormented. My spirits rise and fall.

This is only what is observable. It does not capture the real thing.

The Tao is (like) the emptiness of a vessel;
and in our employment of it we must be on our guard against all fulness.
We should blunt our sharp points,
and unravel the complications of things.

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To get started as a content creator, focus on creating content you enjoy.
Build a following by connecting with others who share your interests.

As far as we can tell, the original content creator didn’t have any followers but really loved hydrogen and helium. One theory is that just after the creation of neutrons, protons and electrons, the content of the universe was hydrogen and helium nuclei for a very long time (380,000 years) until the first atoms formed. Then stars (collections of hydrogen and helium atoms). Then galaxies (collections of stars). It was an enormous enterprise.

This primal content creator gave us time-space, the pressure-cooker of star power to create all the other elements, and a host of physical properties governing the very large and the very small. I picture one of those huge detective walls with tacked note cards and lines of string showing all the interconnections, dependencies and processes. But instead of helping solve a crime, the diagram helps plan the content, the story of the universe.

This content creator’s interests clearly lie in physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, and the mathematics that underpin the rules of this massive undertaking.

But things were about to change. Among the trillions of galaxies (each speeding away from each other like dots on an ever-expanding balloon), there was this one spiral galaxy. On one of its outer arms sits a modest star, and around the star spins a huge cloud of debris which over time accreted through the force of gravity and laws of motion to form distinct rocky planets that orbited around the star.

The third rock from this star was the focus of a second content creator, whose interests lay not in the spinning orbs and grand sweep of universal laws played out among the stars and galaxies. This content creator was focused on amino acids which happened to form in the primordial soup on the surface of this damp ball of rock.

This was the original “start from scratch.” I imagine the key to success was the enormous number of trials needed to transform non-living materials into the common ancestor. This content creator only had the content from the first content creator, and that creator took a long time to set up the mathematical and physical laws that set everything in motion. All the errors on the way to success were left in the primordial dust.

The only thing that worked was the thing that worked.

And when the whole “life” thing really got underway — blue-green algae, single cell organisms, viruses — all this content went… well, viral. The fossil record we have now doesn’t do justice to the fecundity of this content through time. But just look around today. We’ve got bacteria, brachiopods, bivalves, Brussel sprouts, button bushes, bats, birds, bamboo, bumble bees, buffalo. You name it. And many you can’t name.

Each slight variation was better than the previous one. This creative had found their niche in the idea of a replicable cell that would eventually evolve into everything living.

There were hiccups along the way. For instance, 97% of all species on the earth were inexplicably wiped out 250 million years ago, an event known as the Permian Extinction or the Great Dying1. This was one of five mass extinctions.

The fact that life never lost its footing entirely is a tribute to that second content creator. They got something right — a universal genetic code, the capacity of cells to make proteins, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the “molecular unit of currency”2 for intracellular energy transfer for all living cells since the beginning of the first life on earth.

But things were about to change again. This relatively recent newcomer was different in ways that set it apart in some very significant ways from the other 11 million species with whom it shares this rock.

This change required a whole new content creator, whose focus would be a complex mammal. This new species had opposable thumbs, a brain that can visualize and weigh alternative scenarios and pick the one most favorable, an uncanny ability to build tools and “ratchet up”3 innovations across generations. Some scientists identify the “cumulative culture” as a distinctly human process. We don’t have to rethink everything when one generation passes away.

The combined result of these three content creators? The first gave us the void of space punctuated by squiggles of galaxies as far as whatever distance we can see. The second gave us the (hypothesized) latest common ancestral cell population from which all subsequent life forms descended.4 The third gave a species with the capacity for all forms of music, art, science, engineering, literature, law, industry. You name it.

And war, weapons. What other species sets upon one another in this manner? Motives vary. Defensive actions often seem good and just, to stop for instance a ruler who is indisputably evil, or to throw off the bonds of repression.

On the other hand, “liberating our historic lands” (Putin in the Moscow Times) is a questionable motive. As is the weaponization of religious faith to justify colonization and genocide.

In the opening scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, two tribes of hominids shout at each other over control of the water hole. One day, an elder ape (“Stargazer” in the book) figured out how to use a large bone to bludgeon to death the leader of the opposition. In a short million years or so we have nuclear weapons. That’s cumulative culture at its most fierce.

Sligo Creek Parkway (in Silver Spring, MD) has a lovely trail that winds gently between the creek and the roadway under the cover of tall trees. My dog Sienna and I took a walk along part of it earlier this week. At each bridge crossing we would pause to look at the water making its slow journey through the rocky creek bed. I thought about the beauty of the inanimate world.

I spied two turtles basking on a rounded stone poking up from the sliding water. Once a long time ago life was set in motion that would in time bring about these turtles in this habitat.

There are benches here and there along the trail, and on our return to the car I spied one newly installed. There was a small dedication5 on it, and a small pile of wildflowers on the seat.

I will leave you each to think about the kinds of beauty that humans have been able to create. What comes to your mind that illustrates the best we can be?

As for killing each other, persecutions, this war thing — it often comes down to a very few people (men) with unchecked authority and sublimated fear whose creative imaginations have utterly failed. They fall back on violence to assert their… whatever, fill in the blank.

And they fight wars with other people’s bones.

Me? Give me my rock in the sun, some music and a good book.

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Success in any venture will always go to the man who is willing to go one step further than his unsuccessful counterpart.

Tenacity of effort, fueled by hope, begets success.

Those above quotes, which I totally just made up, could have been uttered by any wealthy, white, male industrialist a century ago.

I have been thinking about the purpose of hope. Here are some questions at the center of this issue:

• Does our culture see hope as a necessity, and the pursuit of it an unquestioned virtue?

• Are there different forms of hope: naïve hope, enlightened hope, unwavering hope,vacillating hope, desperate hope, deceived hope, steadfast hope?

• Do we choose to be hopeful? Or does it rise naturally from our disposition–influenced by genetics, experience or a set of circumstances?

• What is hope? A pattern of thought, like a set of assumptions? Or more like a gut feeling?

Hope is not an action, but can motivate a feeling or an action. One person “holds out hope” as a way of buoying the spirit in the face of difficulties that they have no control or limited control over. Another person “keeps hope alive” as a kind of fire that will help them take the next step–a fuel for future agency.

Optimism leavens the soul.

That’s another one I just made up. Bread imagery pairs well with ideas about the function of hope and positive thinking. Plus you have the whole theological angle with the bread of life, rising, and transformation.

There is a ton of literature on the benefits of being hopeful about a particular outcome or optimistic in general. Hope and optimism provide counterpoint to stress and have a calming effect. They make one more resilient. They can help build and maintain trust in one another.

But when I fed the opening quote to ChatGPT to see if I could find a source for anything similar, it gave me, you know, five pages of its “top of mind” ideas delivered with a speed that is AI’s version of giddy delight. If AI were a dog its tail would be wagging all the time.

Its essay raised an important question: Should we choose to be hopeful because it makes us feel uplifted?

On the one hand, one person might hope for something for which there is sufficient evidence that warrants hope.

Another person might believe that hoping inwardly can actually help manifest the hoped for outcome.

I was introduced to the word “hopium” by an eternal optimist. He was talking about his nonprofit organization, then beset by financial misfortune, that was, as he put it, “running on hopium”--a genius turn of phrase. Is hope addictive? Does it give the hopeful a false sense of well-being?

Collins online dictionary defines hopium as a metaphorical substance “said to have been ingested by those who maintain an unrealistically optimistic outlook.” According to this definition, my hopium-addicted colleague was self-medicating, buoying his spirits until the proverbial ship would come in. Hope was not a choice for him; it was a habit and a survival tactic.

In 2023 I was surprised to find a French automotive company named Hopium. Promising a clean efficient automobile powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, Hopium presented in October 2020 its first prototype and started taking orders for the sedan, the Māchina Vision. It had its debut at the 2022 Paris Automotive Week, with market launch set for 2025.

In July 2023 the French company was put into receivership, and subsequently dropped its sedan business, restructured its 9 million euro debt, and got approval for its recovery plan from the French government. It now focuses on fuel cells for heavy transport.

Success goes to the person willing to take the next step. I put my fortune into this venture; I risked everything; I had to shelve my flagship product; I went bankrupt; I kept going.

The new mission of Hopium is “Democratizing hydrogen technology through unparalleled compactness and superior efficiency.”

There is too much Irish in me to embrace an unqualified hopeful outlook. (My mom’s line is MacMahon, a tribe from Limerick; my dad’s given names are Robert Emmett — a nod to the Irish revolutionary of the late eighteenth century.)

In his Irish Impressions (1919), G.K. Chesterton wrote that the Irish have a:

…peculiar habit of living as if the world were likely to break their hearts at any moment.

AI fetched me this apt interpretation of Chesterton’s view:

He was describing what he saw as a kind of tragic readiness in Irish culture — an emotional openness combined with defiance. The idea is that life is fragile, history is cruel, loss is possible at any moment — and yet one lives intensely anyway.

“What a terrible way to live!” exclaimed my late mother-in-law when I described to her how Chesterton’s quote resonated with me. It was an ongoing debate. (Nancy: Things always work out for the best. Me: They absolutely do not always.)

Then there is the famous half-quote “hope springs eternal…” usually voiced with a slight lift at the end. The full iambic line is from Alexander Pope’s 1734 An Essay on Man: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” which seems like an expression of the stubborn nature of wishing. But the full quatrain gives context:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates1 in a life to come.

Pope is underlining the habitual nature of hope, the fulfillment of which we project into the future, ultimately to the blessing of life after death.

As a semi-Irish agnostic I have to ask:

How does belief in the fulfillment of hope after death effect the mindset, manner and methods of one’s life on earth?

That’s a whole other topic you can hope to read about later.

The girl squiggled in her seat, trying out all the possible positions and checking on her mom’s reaction. The boy stood by his dad’s leg, pacifier in mouth and a diminutive but comforting blankie in one hand. The look on his face seemed to say “well, this is new; thank goodness dad’s here.”

The baby was looking out at the world. Did he know, at the tender age of three months, that there even is a world? With his cherry-blushed cheeks and unblinking eyes, the baby’s visage was one of unalloyed consciousness where there is no me, no you, no airport — there is only this moment.

In summary:

Girl: What are all my options for sitting?

Boy: Dad here? Check. Mom here? Check. Safe for now.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know how to represent the mind of the infant. Since the time we become verbal, words are so ubiquitous, so necessary, so…..useful. But words didn’t help here.

Before young humans become verbal — understanding and speaking in order to express themselves — what do their thoughts consist of? It is difficult to reconstruct the state of affairs behind the eyes of that buddha baby.

Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and an expert in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. She was interviewed by Meghna Chakrabarti (“Brainwaves: is AI really thinking?” NPR’s On Point, Feb 11, 2026) and she had this thought about thinking:

There were many people who believed that language and thought were the same thing, and that thinking was a logic process. A process that maybe was reflected in our language as we spoke, that we were expressing our thoughts. And it was all at a conscious level. And when we were solving a problem, we were going through the logical steps of solving the problem.

And that was how AI was created back in the beginning of the field in the 1950s and 1960s. It was all modeling human thought on logic, the steps of rational, logical deduction. But that didn’t work.

It didn’t work because to teach a computer to think in this way would require an impossible amount of code. More effective apparently is to train a system to scour the universe of words on the internet and thereby “teach itself” how to build a coherent response to a prompt by accurately predicting the next word. (Novice disclaimer: Already in over my head, I get the sense that “next word prediction”1 is only part of how Large Language Models work.)

That is how the AI today seems to have such a good grasp of language. Program in some other characteristics (like agreeableness, expression of empathy and encouragement) and you have a very human sounding verbal response to a prompt or question.

But thinking and putting your thoughts to words is very different than mimicking human coherence. Dr. Mitchell explains:

We have a lot more going on in our brains than just predicting the next word. And that’s something that’s very different between how we think and how these machines behave. And language models are passive. They’re fed all this text, they predict the next word. They get some feedback that says right or wrong, and they don’t actually interact with the real world. It’s only the world of language.

So a thought is not words. Consciousness is not a running narration of what we experience in any moment. Once we start to use language, we glom words onto thoughts so quickly we barely are able to distinguish the thought we have put into words and the thought itself.

Anil Seth, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex in England, makes the distinction between an algorithm (a mathematical recipe for doing stuff) and consciousness:2

It’s fundamentally about being, it’s about feeling, it’s having an experience of redness or of pain, the taste of ice cream or the sound of children’s laughter.

That, I believe, is what the baby was experiencing. His consciousness was stirred by the sights and sounds of the airport passengers — in particular the two familiar forms he saw moving nearby, which were his brother and his sister. No words to describe it. No sense of this is me, and that is the world. Just an experience, a taking in of stimuli, a stirring in the young heart and mind.

Words come later. That’s when you “put into words” what you are thinking. But first you need feelings, sensations, emotions. Even the word “emotion” comes from Middle French, emouvoir: to stir up.

“Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” is the final poem in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954). It describes this very idea, that the external reality of experience and the language we use to describe it are distinct. Here is an excerpt:

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind. …
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mâché …
The sun was coming from outside. …
It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Alan Watts, the British philosopher and theologian, recognized that we put words to experience so automatically and quickly that we assume thinking is verbal. Before articulation is experience, or as he put it in his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, “The menu is not the meal.”

And still, and still…

Words can create their own experience and stir our souls.

A few days ago I saw Something Rotten! — a brilliant 2015 musical put on by students at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School where my pal Ritchie is the drama teacher. It’s got everything —Renaissance costumes, Shakespeare, dancing, intrigue, and spectacular musical numbers, all delivered with courage, confidence and joy. It was a delight.

In the first half, the new lovebirds Nigel and Portia share a song3 about their love of words. The refrain goes like this:

I love the places that words let me go
I love the way that your words move me so
I love that you feel the same way I do
And I love

The last line cuts off like that throughout the song.

It’s easy to predict the next word.

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My clients were typically non-profits, lead and staffed by people with a sense of mission and the drive to make a difference in the world. The clients ranged from the legal department of a large healthcare system to a team of lawyers providing pro bono legal counsel for immigrant minors; from senior leaders of international agricultural institutes to a non-profit society of international educators; a small group of medical billing specialists to a small team of transplant surgeons.

I saw little of the suffering in the world first hand, though I traveled and worked with people dealing with some of the intractable issues of our modern world: providing support for refugees, working on ways to protect crops from disease in low-income countries, struggling to get resources to remote villages to help improve child and maternal health outcomes, working for equity in education, and others.

Perhaps the closest I got to the actual action was observing a city emergency room, where a hundred decisions were made triaging a constant flow of human need, from infants with the croup to gun shot victims. Many were desperate and had no other place to go. The skill, precision, clarity and calm of the ER personnel as they worked with each other and with patients and their families was amazing to behold. I watched with awe and humility. These are people who operate under constant pressure, with whatever comes through the door, and they bring all their talent and heart to the task of saving lives and managing the pain and suffering of others. How do they do it?

I wanted to share this to illustrate the real-life drama of human existence that takes place out of sight of many of us: in refugee camps, emergency rooms, rural health clinics, battle fields, prisons. And I want to make a distinction between this primary drama of the human struggle, and the kind of drama I have seen in the workplace and that I call “secondary drama.” An early term I used was “manufactured drama”-- but that didn’t give credit to the fact that secondary drama often occurs unwillingly and in response to real stressors.

What I find most perplexing are the unforced errors. Systemic over-promising and under-delivering. Malicious gossip intended to create divisions and mistrust. Blaming another person for a problem you created. Habitually taking action at the last possible moment, prompting an emergency response from others.

Alarming for its sheer audacity is the example of a division chief at non-governmental organization who made a firm promise to his staff to deliver X by a certain date. When the day and time arrived and he did not deliver on that promise, he suddenly went off-line and no one could find him.

This is the adult equivalent of a child closing his eyes and believing he can’t be seen.

I’m not sure what caused this behavior. It could be he hopes no one will notice. Maybe he is buying time to come up with a reason why “mistakes were made.”1

Attending a conference on human resource development I heard a speaker, Charlie Sheppard share a framework that has stuck with me. It depicted the difference between leadership and drama.

Sheppard posits that one chooses leadership or drama — makes decisions and takes action — moving toward responsibility and accountability and away from victimhood and fault-finding.

Drama is created when the leader:

• Adopts an external locus of control - “I am a victim of circumstances.”

• Avoids accountability - “If something goes wrong, the fault lies out there.”

Leadership is practiced when the leader:

• Adopts an internal locus of control - “I have some say in how things go.”

• Accepts accountability - “I have a role in creating the situation I find myself in.”

But is it really a choice?

Maybe it depends on who you ask.

Those who have practiced leadership in their lives and in their work might agree that there is some choice involved, an intention to keep drama at bay.

Those who live in a state of self-manifested chaos — and therefore can only replicate in the world the disorder inside themselves — have everything to gain from doubling down on their preferred way of viewing themselves: victims of circumstances outside their control and subject to injustice perpetrated on them by their perceived enemies.

Do you know anyone like this? Who faces each day angry, vengeful and aggrieved?2

How better for our own lives and the lives of our families, our communities, and our businesses if we feel — even mostly — engaged, focused and energetic.

The world carries no shortage of real hardship. Part of our calling — as leaders and as members of our businesses, communities, and families — is to create spaces of steadiness: to buffer, to protect, and to ease burdens where we can, so that meaningful work can flourish.

In closing, here is a paraphrase from the 17th century theologian and poet François Fenelon, which speaks to living with a sense of agency:

I ought to consider the duty to which I am called, and apply myself to it with exactness and in peace. I must neglect nothing. I must be violent with nothing.

In essence I hear him say Work hard. Be kind. That sounds about right.

For instance, a trip to the library was essential to answer the question: What was the cause of Hamlet’s delay in avenging the death of his father? And if that question was the subject of your senior high school research paper in Mr. Curtis’s English class, you might spend the better part of several days in a library, pulling books and filling out 3x5 index cards. You would write down one idea per card, and a reference number for the source in the upper right hand corner…

I’m losing some readers now I can tell. My point is that today we have lost the association of research with physical work involving buildings, card catalogues, “shelves” of “books,” and index cards. Lots of index cards. Lots of pencils. Starting in high school all the way through grad school: 1971-1983.

Nowadays, without any of those objects, without leaving home or even this chair, I can find out the tallest office building in the world (the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE at 2,722 feet and 160 floors). But the largest office building by sheer space is the Surat Diamond Bourse in Gujarat, India — at 660,000 square meters, finished in 2023.

That’s slightly more than the office space of One World Trade Center, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building combined.

For 80 years prior to the Gujarat construction, however, the status of the largest office building in the world — standing 77 feet in height with a floor space of 620,000 square meters — belonged to one of our very own: The Pentagon.

I drove past it many mornings on my way to the USAID Training Center then located in Crystal City, Virginia. In many ways The Pentagon is unremarkable — such a low profile as viewed from US Route 1 you might miss it altogether.

But it is there, huge and way too heavy for Abby Hoffman to levitate it in 1967, even when accompanied by the Tibetan chants offered by Allen Ginsberg.1

In the early teens, there was a survey that put this question to a random sample of the US populace: What percentage of the federal budget does international development represent? Hard to say what went on in the respondents’ minds, but the average number they came up with was something like 20%.

It was actually .3%. That is three tenths of one percent of the federal budget. If, for example, a South African billionaire vowed to reduce US government spending, it is hard to argue that starting with USAID was anything other than ugly, horrific and stupid.

When I worked with USAID in the early teens, the 3-D model US foreign policy seemed to hold sway. The three Ds were Defense, Diplomacy and Development and were considered by some to have equal importance. Diplomacy and providing foreign aid and assistance are both ways of building partnerships with other nations. If we are not helping to lift up the low-income nations, then some other power — say, China — will fill the gap.

But back to the numbers.

In fiscal year 2024 (the most recent full year of data), the U.S. Department of State spent about $38.8 billion according to USFacts.2 That represented roughly 0.6 % of total federal spending — out of a total federal budget of about $6.75 trillion.

So, let’s see…USAID (.3%) and the State Department (.6%) combined were around 1% of the federal budget. That’s the diplomacy and development side of the 3Ds.

Defense? Well, here again I was surprised. In FY 2023, Department of Defense spending constituted 13.3% of the entire federal budget, and nearly 50% of the discretionary budget.3

Seems like a lot.

Costs of War, a research project of Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs, is an excellent resource for information on the economic, human, environmental, and social costs of US wars and military spending. Their research estimates that US wars since 9/11 (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, and related costs) have totaled around $8 trillion or more.

See, that’s the thing about research. I have not left the chair I was sitting in at the beginning of this post and I learned:

• Veterans Affairs are listed separately in the federal budget

• There is no line item for the costs of any particular war, so there is not an easy way to tally what war in general costs us taxpayers

• Since 9/11, most of that $8 trillion in spending has been put on the national credit card.

Recently I attended a live streamed panel discussion hosted by the Watson School. One of the panelists was Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She termed the phrase “ghost budget” to describe the budgetary sleight of hand to cover our costs without anyone really noticing. From the Costs of War website:

The post-9/11 wars were funded largely through debt, rather than through increased taxes or the sale of war bonds, as U.S. wars of the past were funded. The use of debt rather than increased taxes makes war more invisible to taxpayers, obscuring the true costs of war by pushing financial obligations to future generations. Moreover, increased public debt results in higher interest rates economy-wide, which can hamper business investments and make life more expensive for individuals and families.

So let me see if I’ve got this. Instead of raising taxes or selling bonds like we used to do to pay for wars, Congress uses supplemental appropriations (aka, you’ll love this, “Overseas Contingency Operations”). These OCO funds are almost entirely deficit-financed. Farhad Omar’s Substack “The Credit Card War and the Dollar’s Dilemma” characterizes this trend since 9/11:

Multiple administrations fought prolonged wars almost entirely through supplemental appropriations that bypassed the regular budgeting process. Congress quietly added trillions to the deficit without hard votes or public debate.

Emphasis mine.

There is a big dollar difference between paying for a standing army and paying for a war. The first cost is its own line item so to speak, but the second cost is buried in the uptick of another line item: Payment on the National Debt, which currently is 13% and rising.

The costs of war are muddled into the debt, the debt into interest payments, and the interest payments into “mandatory spending.” So by the time you ask “Can we cut this cost?” the answer is “We already spent it.” And now we have to pay interest on it.

The totality of the costs of war is like driving past The Pentagon on US Route 1: you hardly know it’s there.

Now I need to levitate myself out of this chair and shovel some snowcrete4 — something I can see and feel.

4

Snowcrete is a portmanteau: a combination of the words “snow” and “concrete,” which describes snowpack so dense and heavy people can stand on it and not fall through. Sintered snow acts like a solid thanks to inches of sleet that fell, then froze during Winter Storm Fern and the days of frigid temperatures that followed. Baltimore Fishbowl News article by Aliza Worthington, Feb 3, 2026. “Sintering” is the process of compacting and forming a solid mass of material by pressure. I had to look it up.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere is brought to you by readers like you, from the curious browser, to the cheering fan, to the reader just stopping by. Please consider subscribing. Or sharing. Or liking. Or re-stacking. And thanks. You are not invisible to me!

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“An integral part of professional development, giving constructive feedback is a skill that every good leader ought to have,” would be a really great topic sentence for my next paragraph. Except I came across a piece I wrote maybe twenty years ago during a dark period which begins:

I have stopped teaching people how to give constructive feedback. I am a leadership trainer and coach; I have taught feedback since the 1980s. No more. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because “it” is all technique. And effective feedback is not about the strength of the technique. It’s about the strength of the relationship between two people.

So I want to share some notes I have made since then about why it can be difficult to give someone a “constructive critique,” or even to hint that you have an issue with something they are doing or saying.

I imagine that everyone carries around a little mental notepad. As they go through life, each person writes down how they see themselves. Over time I have collected a substantial list of my characteristics and qualities. It is a mix of positive attributes and other stuff that I need to “work on” to get better at. You get the idea.

One item on my list is “I take feedback as an opportunity to learn and grow” and this applies to my work life, social life and married life.

You can imagine my surprise when, in a conversation with someone, I make an astute observation and this person responds with an eye roll and the comment “OMG, that is such a Boomer thing to say!”

So I said “I believe feedback is an opportunity to learn and grow. Tell me more about why you said that.” Totally kidding. I would never say that. My first response is to go through a mental checklist in my head:

1. Pull out my mental notebook

2. Search for any notes about weaknesses related to being a Boomer

3. Conclude that there are no data on such weaknesses

4. Snap the notebook shut like one of those old flip phones.

The next reaction is said out loud: “Alright, TikTok” or “Noted, Algorithm” or That’s an interesting critique – for someone raised by Wi-Fi.”” Or something equally dismissive.

So that’s part of the problem. I like adding to the list in my notebook. I mostly don’t like other people adding to it.

I remember introducing the topic of feedback to a small group of young non-profit leaders. I opened the topic in a fairly conventional way by first asking everyone to think about a time they got constructive feedback from someone. Several in the group had puzzled looks. I’ll never forget what one of them said:

“I seriously can not think of any example of getting negative feedback.”

I probed: Ever? It doesn’t have to be work related. Friends? Family? Doesn’t have to be a major takedown. Anything?

Nothing. Now, it could have been they didn’t want to share. Or they didn’t want to admit to any specific failing.

But I think it’s more likely that they have not ever been corrected or critiqued in any way that they remember. I would not be surprised to find out that the workplace today is awash with a generation of workers who have never been told that anything they’ve ever done was anything other than perfectly executed and worthy of high praise.

And no wonder. Giving feedback to a friend, a peer, a colleague, a staff member seems to be universally difficult. It is like traversing a personal and emotional minefield.

I regularly read Carolyn Hax, an astute and honest broker of personal advice whose column appears in the Washington Post — at least as of this writing. Yesterday (Feb 4), the Post suddenly downsized its staff, eliminating sports, local news, book reviews– and probably the weather. In a recent column (Feb 1, 2026: Can their marriage be dying of…pickleball?) the writer asks Carolyn Hax for advice about her attempts to talk to husband about the obsessive amount of time he devotes to his new pastime:

“Every time I bring up that the pickleball and family time balance is just really off, he takes offense, gets angry and accuses me of trying to tell him to stop doing something he loves.”

She tried to open a dialogue. His reaction? Anger, defensiveness, accusation (You’re the one with the problem!) Classic male deflection, some might say.

Well, that’s one approach. This technique is in the news nearly every day. If I don’t like the media telling me I lie all the time, I say the media lies and I promise vengeance. Practice anything long enough and you get pretty good at it.

I go back to my mental notebook. I see feedback as an indispensable tool for growth and development. It offers the opportunity for course-correction. It helps us avoid making the same mistake over and over. It shines light on personal blind spots. Wouldn’t it be best if I developed the ability to receive feedback in as many different forms and different ways as possible? Think what could be learned!

in one of his notes has this to say about difficult conversations:

The most important thing about contentious communication is that things will go much better if you can communicate with genuine openness to whatever comes back at you.

Genuine openness. Saying “Tell me more.” That sounds like something I could get good at.

I will end on a light note — by far my favorite quote about giving constructive feedback.

“Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.”

Always good to have a back-up plan.

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To do this task with any efficiency requires taking off the hat of sentimentality and putting on the hat of resolve and decisiveness.

The culled books now sit in two columns, each two feet high. I gaze at them with satisfaction and quickly notice a theme. Most of them are from my business library, from the time when I was a management consultant and executive coach.

Not surprising, I suppose; five years ago I went to the tiring-house of retirement1 to trade in my dress shirts, ties, suits and uncomfortable shoes for jeans, flannel shirts and walking shoes.

The “keep” pile comprises many business-related volumes, but I was struck by where I placed nearly all my books about managing change — in the culled stacks. Here are a few titles:

• Immunity to Change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization

• Switch: How to change things when change is hard

• Change Anything: The new science of personal success

For those of you unfamiliar with organization development esoterica, there is a huge body of knowledge on change management: a large and sometimes unwieldy umbrella term for anything from how to bring about change in the corporate culture and how to smooth the adoption of new technology, to how to help your team navigate changing consumer demand and how to be personally resilient in the face of relentless change. As I said — a big umbrella.

I can always find this content somewhere if I need it. But I will lose the capacity to casually, aimlessly, flip through an actual book. Which is what I spent the next hour doing.

In my career as a training facilitator, I must have designed dozens of workshops on the topic of managing change. First, I would research the topic and distill what I learned. Typically I would find a visual model that helps summarize a complex topic.

Above is the U-shaped curve theory by Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard. He was studying the phenomenon of culture shock, when Norwegian students go to live in another country. He describes the four stages this way:

Adjustment as a process over time seems to follow a U-shaped curve: adjustment is felt to be easy and successful to begin with; then follows a ‘crisis’ in which one feels less well adjusted, somewhat lonely and unhappy; finally one begins to feel better adjusted again, becoming more integrated into the foreign community.

Renowned psychiatrist Walter Menninger was contracted by the early Peace Corps to research the challenges faced by volunteers when they returned to the U.S. The Menninger Morale Curve was the result.

This idea of the variability of morale during time of change has many uses. In my own work this kind of framework helped remind leaders that their staff will go through phases of adaptation when confronted with organizational change, be it a restructure, a new technology, or a new boss. Good leaders help people through this process and don’t just assume “they’ll get used to it.”

Change can be disruptive and disorienting. This curved framework is also found in the five stages of grieving, as posited by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

Over the years, I started seeing similar curves being applied to everything from personal change…

…to levels of happiness as a function of aging…

…to morale levels during 5-year surgical residencies.

Allow me to paraphrase the small print at the bottom. You can imagine the applicability to so many situations in everyday life and learning:

• Arrival: Characterized by excitement and high morale. “I can do this!”

• Engagement: Reality hits home, morale falls. “What have I gotten myself into??”

• Acceptance: Initiative and activism to improve the situation. “What steps can I take?”

• Reentry: Morale on even keel, more satisfaction with accomplishments. “I’ve got this.”

Bottom line: it helps to know there are phases to the change process; it helps to know these phases are recognizable and “normal”; it helps to know the bottom of the U is not the end of the story.

So, why don’t I need these books anymore? Part of the reason is that thinking back I struggle to identify a single organizational “change effort” that was executed with anything approximating institutional aplomb.

Also, after years of executive coaching I begin to wonder: Do people really change in order to grow and develop? Or do they learn and find success by becoming more themselves, and working with what they’ve got?

At this point, I have to state the obvious — the feeling many of us have that we are on a downward slope as a democracy, not yet at — but apparently approaching — the bottom of a U-shaped curve. Except it feels like a tragic dismantling. It does not feel like a curve.

Yet. We start to feel the rising side when we see the result of protest, when we spy again the guardrails of our rule of law, when we despair less (“What is happening to us?”) and hope more (“Where do we have the power to make a positive difference?”) — to bring back some light, some sense of justice, some greater measure of the best we can be as a nation.

I am keeping Otto Scharmer’s book entitled Theory U. It is a huge, complex volume and very heavy. The way he describes his U-shaped curve gives me hope:

As we move down the left side of the U, we allow ourselves to connect with the world outside our bubble. Reaching the bottom of the U, we suspend our common assumptions and thinking, letting come our highest future possibility. Finally as we ascend the right side of the U, we bring forth the new into the world.

Some days I am hard pressed to imagine the upward side of the curve. But I have to believe it is there.

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It was all just what one would want in a gathering of this kind, plus several songs sung in her honor.

She sent the group text a few days after, thanking us. She said that one of her favorite things to do is to sing with others, and that she appreciated the storytelling and the humor that evening. She concluded saying that she hadn’t laughed that much in a while and that it was “good for the soul.”

My wife Busy and I went to another gathering recently. This was a potluck (I baked an apple pie). We knew the host and only a few other people. I am not what you would call a great mixer at such events — so it was notable that I had as many interesting conversations as I did, with people I did not know. But that’s the kind of group it was — sociable, kind, and open to connecting, both with the knowns and unknowns.

When we were doing our good-byes, we learned from our host that this was the inaugural event. She had decided that the theme of this year was “friendship.” She envisioned a rolling set of potlucks, at different people’s houses, over the course of the year. The aim, as she put it, is to “broaden and deepen our friendships and community connections.”

Even with a sample size of two parties, I want to extrapolate a theme. In this dark time of year, in a troubling time in history, we the people are looking for all the ways at our disposal — large and little — to counteract the seemingly unrestrainable forces of division, hatred and dissolution that we all feel closing in.

I can hear the skeptics: You see all this from a couple of parties?

OK. I have one more – Aubrey Atwater. She is a community song leader and music therapist who was the featured artist on the Daily Antidote of Song, an online “sing along” event which happens every day at noon.

I would normally put this in a footnote, but it is important enough to elaborate here. The Daily Antidote of Song was launched in April 2020 by our friend Jo Rasi as a simple yet powerful response to isolation and fear. The program continues today — 2,118 consecutive days as of this posting — with a mission to promote peace and justice, joy and connection.

A program of Carpe Diem Arts, it features diverse folk and traditional music from many cultures alongside songs for social justice. Each weekday (12:00–12:30 pm ET) a host welcomes the visiting artist(s), who teach one or two songs, invite participants to sing along (muted) using lyrics in the chat, and reflect on their creative work and inspirations before a final reprise. To date, more than 700 hosts and recording artists from five continents — including several Grammy winners — have shared their voices and stories. People have tuned in from all 50 states and 30+ countries. It’s pretty amazing. Check it out here.

On this particular day (Jan 12, 2026) Aubrey Atwater was the featured artist, coming to us live from Wharton, Rhode Island. Her instrument was the Appalachian lap dulcimer, and she briefly talked about her work at Boston Children’s Hospital, considered by many to be the premier pediatric hospital in the nation. Her first song My Bonny Bonny Boat was about Ida Lewis, the famous and intrepid lighthouse keeper from Newport, RI who saved over 80 people in her career. From her Wikipedia page: “Lewis made her first rescue in 1854, coming to the assistance of four men whose boat had capsized. She was 12 years old.”

Aubrey Atwater acknowledged that what she is doing might seem incongruous to some:

You might think “Wow, a person singing in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) about a lighthouse keeper? In the 19^th century?” But how lovely that these can go together!

She comes from, as she says, “a very salty family,” immersed as it were in the world of fishing and boats. Ballast is a weight within a boat that helps give stability, especially in turbulent times. She had this to say about singing.

My job in a way is about joy and not just any kind of joy — human joy as a ballast to good work and action. And so that’s where I think we musicans can figure in, whether for activisim or for the hardships of the human experience. To bring beauty and joy.

Her second tune was a Scottish lullaby Hush the Waves.

I sing lullabies to all people and we all benefit from the soothing qualities of music. I love the science behind this. When I sing in the intensive Care Unit of the Children’s Hospital, I can see the child’s vitals changing before my eyes on the monitors — the heart rate getting calmer, the blood pressure going down, the oxygen level going up.

Is it possible? That in the face of such outward turmoil, these supposedly small acts can make a difference?

Maybe a small difference, but maybe enough ballast to our boats that we can keep going, connecting each other — and maybe sometimes saving each other — one song at a time.

Note

Aubrey Atwater’s appearance on The Daily Antidote of Song is on Facebook here. The songs are at 3:38 and 17:50.

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Having typed this quote, I think I made it up. But it is an easy matter to ask AI who might have said something like it. Turns out, Alice Miller (Polish-Swiss psychologist) wrote something very close. Says my AI source:

The idea very closely matches the central thesis of the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller — especially her work on childhood trauma and its influence on later violent, authoritarian, or cruel behavior.

Miller argued that many dictators and authoritarian personalities learned cruelty, dominance, and the need to humiliate others because of painful or humiliating experiences in their own childhoods that can be replayed later in life on a larger scale (e.g., in political power).1

I imagine that at some point in his young life, the future autocrat was made to feel shame at some deep and terrible level. At some point he resolves: From now on until forever I will do or say anything so that I am never humiliated by anyone, nor ever again feel shame.

The imperative to do or say anything is anchored in fear. The school recess bullies some of whom become our future tyrants on the world stage have honed techniques to keep the world from seeing their fear. And they have practiced for so long that they have forgotten how afraid they really are. They lost the word for fear. They turn it on the rest of the world.

“I don’t recognize the country I live in.” I have heard versions of this more and more often. We know that children “act out” when there is something bothering them — there is some need that has not been met or some internal conflict between what they desire and what their world says they can get.

This post started in my head as an attempt to address this conundrum Our country is becoming “unrecognizable” because of the actions and words of politically very powerful men. They seem unhappy — getting mad at people who ask a certain kind of question, promising to get even with accusers, shutting down debate, calling “fake” any news — or individual words — that do not comport with their vision of themselves. Name calling. Threatening perceived enemies. And allies.

All the other crime-mob behavior we all have been watching.

Will it take history and perspective to answer the question: “What are they acting out?” Right now we are preoccupied with all the chaos they have created.

If this were a child’s behavior, a helpful parent would seek help and treatment.

If the cause of the problem is unconscious suppression of past trauma, Carl Jung has this idea:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual…does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must by force of necessity act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”2

A couple decades ago I attended a lecture/workshop by Harvard psychologist Donal C. Klein. I remember him saying that the emotional power of humiliation is analogous to a nuclear weapon. Klein was probably citing the work of Evelin Lindner3 a German-Norwegian scholar. In a summary4 of her book Making enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict, Brett Reeder of the Conflict Research Consortium writes:

She argues that humiliation instigates extremism and hampers moderate reactions and solutions. Humiliation, she says, has the tendency to destroy everything in its path, making it "the nuclear bomb of emotions."

“U.S. Executive Leadership: Hampering Moderate Reactions and Solutions since 2025.”

It starts with little men who are afraid of being wrong or being seen as wrong in any way. They cope with their buried fear by projecting it out into the world.

I just wish their little hands were not so close to actual nuclear weapons.

Enough! Next week I am going to talk about joy, dammit.

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“Fifty-four forty or fight.”

I can hear the incredulous: Seriously? Top of mind is a political slogan from James Polk’s presidential campaign of 1844?!

You have to admit, it’s catchy - short, alliterative and a call to action. This unit of cultural information was termed a slogan. Now it would be called a meme.

A brief visit to Wikipedia told me a couple things. First, it apparently was not a campaign slogan, but was coined a few years after regarding the “Oregon Question.”

The second point is the profound complexity related to that catchy phrase. Expansionist ambitions in the region in the early 1800s included the U.S., Great Britain, Spain and Russia. The region in question was the territory west of the continental divide between the 42nd parallel — a line of latitude marked now by the northern border of California — and the 54°40’ parallel (54 degrees 40 minutes) which was the southern border of what was then called “Russian America.”

After the war of 1812, the dispute was down to two parties — the U.S. and Great Britain. “Fifty-four forty or fight” reflected the American sentiment of the time — either we get the territory we want or else… More on Manifest Destiny coming up.

The compromise — for those on the edge of your seats — was to draw the line at the 49th parallel, which to this day marks the northern border of the U.S. from Washington to Minnesota.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how two imperialist powers resolved the dispute over land inhabited for over 10,000 years by the Chinook and 29 other tribes of Indigenous People. (See map below).

“Fun” fact: You will not find the Chinook on the above map because they are not a federally recognized tribe (although in 1962 The Army liked the name enough to brand the new heavy-lift helicopter The Chinook.) The Department of the Interior recognized the tribe in 2001 at the end of the Clinton administration. Eighteen months later, political appointees of George W. Bush revoked the recognition. Attempts to re-establish the Chinook as a tribe since then have been unsuccessful.

But that’s a small matter compared to the responsibilities of Manifest Destiny. There is a lot bundled into this bumper-sticker of a meme.

According to Wikipedia: “Most historians credit the conservative newspaper editor and future propagandist for the Confederacy, John O’Sullivan, with coining the term manifest destiny in 1845.” O’Sullivan was arguing for the right of the U.S. to claim all of disputed Oregon territory. As he wrote:

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

So, basically, “Manifest Destiny” is not only memorable and fun to say — with the repeated “est” sound, kudos to Mr O’Sullivan!1 — it has all the characteristics of a fabulous call to action. It is obvious (“manifest’), and certain — as inevitable a destiny for our young nation as Lorraine Baines was for George McFly in Back to the Future (1985).

Throw in for good measure: 1) the unique moral virtue of the new nation, 2) a mission to redeem the world, and 3) a belief that success in spreading the American way of life is divinely ordained2 and you have either a real conversation stopper or a new recruit. The Almighty is in on this? Sign Me Up!

The above image touches on several themes we have covered. The caption to this iconic graphic in the Wikipedia article on manifest destiny reads:

“American Progress” (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a school book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. On the left, Indigenous Americans are displaced from their ancestral homeland.

The Oregon Question was a long time ago. It seems, however, that a sense of exceptionalism lives on in some hearts and minds. The idea of woe to the conquered has been around since Thucydides: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” That could be the modus operandi of any imperial cabinet.

“Might Makes Right” is catchy. Emotionally charged. Decisive. Simplistic. Avoids nuance, context, and moves right to action.

Back in the 1800s our rightness and might-ness got us the western states. What’s the next frontier? Sky’s the limit.

Next up, we take a look at The Bay of Pigs: a case study in strategic leadership and failed assumptions, by Vincent Dueñas…

Notes:

The Oregon Question

Tribes of Washington State

Chinook Nation

Bay of Pigs case study from May 2, 2017

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