When to Say No

In Gavin de Becker’s book, Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane), he discusses how people often fail to trust their intuition that signals potential threats. We encounter a situation that doesn’t quite feel right – it may not even be something we can articulate – and instead of trusting our gut, we proceed due to social norms or lessons we were taught as children. Although de Becker focuses on the largest stakes for failing to heed our natural warning signals – namely the safety of our children – I’ve recently considered applying his advice to less drastic aspects of our lives: knowing when to say to no to an opportunity. 

I find this to be a very tricky endeavor, a balancing act that I don’t always get right, but I seem to be succeeding more often today than in my younger years. On the one hand, I don’t want to automatically say no to opportunities that might allow me to grow, meet new friends and experience new things even if it makes me a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, I don’t want to commit to participating in activities that I dread, that take me away from things I’m passionate about or that make me unnecessarily anxious. 

How do you find a balance? After all, sometime encountering a situation that produces anxiety is exactly what you should do. When should you accept the challenge and when should you walk away from it?

I’m still working on it, but I’ve noticed a few things about my choices over the past few years.

1)     When it comes to friends and family, just do it.

I hate letting people down. HATE it. For that reason I’ve sometimes committed to doing things that I didn’t really want to do for fear that my friend or relative would think less of me or that I would feel especially guilty. I’ve come to appreciate this aspect of my character and I’ve learned that it’s better for me to commit to supporting the people in my life even if it’s mildly inconvenient or produces some anxiety. That’s what friends do and I’m okay with it. There have been times in my life when I didn’t support someone the way I should have and I’ve regretted it and sometimes suffered the consequences. The exception to this rule is if there’s someone in your life who is particularly corrosive to your well-being. I imagine that in these situations your intuition will be practically screaming at you to avoid the situation. Best to listen.

2)      When it comes to strangers, acquaintances or friends of friends, don’t fall for flattery.

It’s one thing when you’re dealing with friends and relatives, but quite another when confronting strangers or acquaintances, perhaps people you’re not even particularly fond of. In these situations I’ve found that my biggest foe is flattery. Someone thinks I would be especially good at (fill in the blank – playing piano for an event, leading a charitable team, attending a party) and even though I have no interest in the activity, I say yes up front because it makes me feel important and wanted. I’ve discovered that in these situations the first conversation should only be fact-finding in nature, and not until I’ve had a day or two to think things over should I commit. Failing to do so often leads to painful results, and I have failed many, many times, some as recently as this summer! I’m still learning.

3)      Consider breaking your word.

This is the one that’s really tough for me. As I said before, I hate letting people down, so once I commit to doing something I’m a very reliable person, but I’ve recently learned that there are situations in which withdrawing my participation leads to a boost in well-being and perhaps a benefit to the other party as well. I’ll never withdraw from a project when It would leave someone high and dry – bowing out of a gig on short notice, for example – but in situations where I know the person(s) will be able to manage without me or will have enough time to find a replacement, I’ve found that it’s perfectly acceptable – if mildly regrettable – to say, “This isn’t working for me. Thanks for the opportunity.” Flattery will try to convince us that we’re indispensable, but the reality is no one is indispensable. In many situations leaving an anxiety-producing situation will leave everyone in a better place eventually. I imagine it’s a lot like ending a relationship, preferably before the wedding date has been set.

4)     If an activity can potentially lead you to achieving a life goal, let reason trump fear.

I’ve encountered this a few times in my role as a musician. Sometimes I’ve placed myself in a situation that I didn’t feel comfortable in but I’ve felt that the stakes were high enough to warrant the anxiety. If a record producer told me that he wanted to use several of my songs for a star recording artist, but first he wanted to hear me perform them in front of a live audience, on some level this would be an anxiety-producing nightmare but well worth the effort for an opportunity to have my songs recorded. Sometimes your gut should be overruled. Other times? Not. For example, I’ve learned that my ability to perform classical music in front of an audience produces more anxiety for me that it’s worth. I’m not looking to be a classical artist and there are other forms of music that I enjoy more and play more competently, so now when I play an “offering” piece at the Presbyterian church on Sundays, I play a jazz or pop composition. The congregants seem to appreciate it, and my hands aren’t shaking during the performance!

5)     When your cup is full, don’t pour more into it.

A friend of mine once said to his wife: “I can be a good father, a good husband and a good carpenter,” (he was putting an addition on his house) “but I can only be good at two of those things at once. Which do you want me to let go of?” I love this, and I wish more people would be willing to lay things out so succinctly at their workplace. I recently told someone that my volunteer cup is full and that I’m going to start saying no to things even if they’re right up my alley. I’m simply at my limit when it comes to volunteering and won’t take on anything more. When I stop doing one volunteer activity then we can talk about taking on a new challenge. God willing, I’ll have plenty of more years to dabble in new opportunities.

6)     Apply your guidelines retroactively.

After writing out this list I applied my rules to four situations I experienced in the past year when I should have said no but didn’t. In each case there was a moment when I should have raised my hands and said, “Thanks for your consideration, but I’m not going to pursue this.”  In three of the four situations I did eventually withdraw from the project and was a better for it, but in the future I’d like to trust my gut at the time it tells me to get out and not weeks or months later. It won’t only benefit me, but the people to whom I’ve responded.

So there you have it: some hard-learned wisdom from someone who’s not always known for being wise, unless you include being a wiseass. In summary, when it comes to safely, take de Becker’s advice and heed your intuition. For other things, listen to your gut and give it a vote, but not necessarily a veto.  In time you may find the right balance.

The Eclipse

I have on occasion poked fun at meteorologists for making a career out of being incorrect more often than not, like a ball player’s hitting chances but with more riding on it, but perhaps the jokes aren’t as deserved as they used to be. Nate Silver makes the claim in his book The Signal and the Noise that the science of weather has become much more accurate as of late. When a forecast includes a thirty percent chance of afternoon thunderstorms, the numbers apparently bear that out: ten days under similar conditions will in fact produce close to three afternoons of rain.

Accurate or not, Monday morning led to thousands of people analyzing weather data like never before in preparation for the Great American total eclipse. I checked and rechecked the forecasts late Sunday, early Monday and again en route to determine our final destination.  Initially I was ready to drive to southern Illinois, but the updated forecast read:

Carbondale, IL:  12PM – Partly sunny,  1PM – Cloudy,  2PM – Cloudy,  then afternoon showers

Fulton, MO: 12PM – Partly sunny,  1PM – Partly sunny,  2PM – Partly sunny, then afternoon showers

Partly sunny trumped cloudy, so I along with my son and two of his friends drove the extra distance to Kingdom City, Missouri on Highway 54 and set up shop next to the Pick-A-Dilly Quick Stop along with hundreds of other eager viewers. It was a perfect location, including shade to picnic in, access to a relatively clean bathroom and $1 Diet Cokes to boot. We looked upward with our eclipse glasses through thin, hazy clouds to see the eclipse begin, and for the moment it looked like the weather forecast was spot on.

Then the weather went from mostly sunny with hazy cloud cover to mostly cloudy to downright cloudy and back again, the sun alternating between clearly visible to clearly not.  Not a terrible situation, but it was still an hour away from the total eclipse, and the crowd started getting restless. I made conversation with a man from Wisconsin who had commented on my UW hat, and before driving down from Port Washington he’d narrowed his trip to three possible locations: Carbondale, IL, central Missouri or southeastern Nebraska. Somehow we ended up in the exact same location, and the thickening cloud cover caused him to consider relocating and driving one or two exits east on highway 70 where it looked like the skies might be a bit clearer. The problem was, would there be a place to park and view the eclipse?  Would there be the same splendid access to a bathroom? And would the skies really be any better?

We both conferred with our respective clans and decided to stick it out, wishing the eclipse would hurry up as the clouds to the west grew thicker and thicker. 

1:05 came around, and it looked like the total eclipse was imminent. As clouds slipped away to give us a better view people verbally cheered on the moon as if it were running at a track meet. “Come on! You can do it!” Cicadas started singing in the tall trees behind us. At 1:10 there was such as slight sliver of sun that it couldn’t possible wait any longer to slip behind the moon, but still we waited to an ever-dimming atmosphere that resembled dusk but with lighting that appeared artificial, unnatural, like a giant film set. 

And at 1:13 as the moon overtook the last hint of sun, the clouds that had intermittently blocked our view and caused anxiety for the previous hour disappeared. People oohed and aahed. Camera shutters opened and closed. Taco Bell’s lights across the street turned on. And when it was over, the congregation of sky-watchers clapped. I high-fived my son and his friends.

One of his friends said, “That was amazing.”

I was relieved, not only for having chosen a spot that brought our journey to fruition, but that the teenagers with me were impressed by something that nature created. After all that their young eyes have seen in their short lifetimes, I wasn’t sure the sun and the moon would live up to the hype. 

Fifteen minutes after the total eclipse ended, it started to rain.

Chalk one up for the meteorologists.

To Read or not to Read

A friend of mine reads over 100 books a year.  That’s right.  A staggering feat of one book every 3.6 days with about a 40/60 non-fiction to fiction split. To put matters in perspective, he and I both happened to read Paul Auster’s novel, 4-3-2-1, an extremely dense 850-page book that took me three weeks to finish. That’s about 280 pages a week for me…not too bad, right? 

But at my friend’s rate, assuming an average of 300 pages per book, he must read at more than twice that rate, around 575 pages per week or 82 pages per day. And this doesn’t allow for any I-don’t-feel-like-reading breaks. You know, those days when you just want to open a bag of chips, turn on the baseball game and have a few beers? After reading 4-3-2-1 I needed to cleanse the pallet a little, so I took a few days off of reading altogether before diving into a comic book (Doonesbury: The Reagan Years – an excellent read, BTW) followed by the extremely short and entertaining Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris, and now I’m nearly through yet another light read, Seinfeldia. Only after I complete this lightweight morsel will I finally take on a book with more substance. 

So how does my friend do it? His simple answer to me was “I don’t watch TV.  If I have downtime, I read.” Pretty simple, right? I don’t really watch TV either, except baseball and football, but I am an expert in finding other ways to pass time without actually accomplishing anything (I’m doing one right now!). But clearly the practice of turning off the TV or phone or computer to engage in some other pursuit – reading, practicing an instrument, taking a class, learning to dance – really can lead to amazing results.

Like my friend, I log all of the books I read. I’m up to fourteen in 2017 – a very good clip for me. Here are the tallies for years past:

2016 – 21

2015 – 19

2014 – 11

2013 – 13

2012 – 8

2011 – 12

2010 – 8

2009 – 12

2008 – 28 (I’m not sure what happened here, except to say it was my son’s first year in all-day school, so I must have taken advantage of it.)

Things get a little shaky after this from a record keeping perspective, but you get the idea. Except for the outlier of 2008, I’ve been around a book a month guy, though it looks like I might be inching closer to a book every two weeks guy. Not a bad clip, and it might be a good goal to finish around 24 books a year.

I’m also someone who looks up words when I’m reading and logs the ones I think are worth remembering (I have an Excel spreadsheet of about 420 words I’m trying to master), and that slows me down considerably.  One would hope that over time I would become more knowledgeable and not have research so many words, thereby increasing the number of books I read each year. 

One would hope…and yet, last night I once again had to look up the word feckless, despite its inclusion on my spreadsheet for the past eight years. 

How’s that for feckless?

The Skills of Expression

For the last year or so my workouts and long car rides have been accompanied by Marc Maron, Terry Gross, Greg Kot and Jim Derogatis. Nothing passes time like a good interview, and yesterday while huffing and puffing on a stationary bicycle I heard a doozy of a conversation on Sound Opinions with multi-talented Esperanza Spalding, just another of the seemingly endless blind spots I have in my musical repertoire. I only knew Spalding as the bass player with big hair who beat out Justin Bieber for the Best New Artist Grammy some years ago, but after this interview I’m next in line to purchase her latest album, Emily’s D+Evolution. (Yes, that’s right, if you like a piece of art, you should buy it, not stream it on youtube.) This gal can not only play, she can express herself, think deeply, push boundaries and challenge conventional wisdom. If you haven’t heard the interview, I highly recommend it.

But it was the interesting juxtaposition of something Spalding said and a quote from a character in the Mike Mills film 20th Century Women that prompted me to write this blog.

20th Century Women is if nothing else a love song to punk music, and while I’ve never been a fan of the genre, I was taken with the following exchange as Dorothea – played by Annette Bening – challenges Abbie – played by Greta Gerwig – about the music she’s listening to (thanks to Wikiquote for making this easy):

Dorothea: What is that?

Abbie: It's The Raincoats.

Dorothea: Can't things just be pretty?

Jamie: Pretty music is used to hide how unfair and corrupt society is.

Dorothea: Ah, okay so... they're not very good, and they know that, right?

Abbie: Yeah, it's like they've got this feeling, and they don't have any skill, and they don't want skill, because it's really interesting what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it. It creates this energy that's raw. Isn't it great?

There’s something to this, I think, and it really made me consider punk music in a new way.  There is something very powerful in expressing oneself in a raw, uninhibited way despite not having tools to do so eloquently. It happens at nearly every outdoor festival I play at. There’s always that one guy – usually shirtless – who stands near the side of the stage and dances. Dances like there’s no tomorrow, like he’s offering a primitive prayer to the heavens, arms and legs flailing, torso gyrating, eyes closed. This man is dancing despite not knowing how to pirouette or jeté, and there’s something very freeing and very pure about this, like when a three year-old joyously shakes and stomps to music. I wish I could express myself as uninhibitedly.

But in the Sound Opinions interview Spalding offers another way to consider things:

“You need technical prowess to express yourself freely. You don’t need to use all of it all of the time, but it really helps to have technical facility.” She goes on to mention dance troops who hire ballet dancers, not because they’re performing ballet, but because they need the technical skills to pull off the dance moves the troop requires. “Music is the same. Jazz music, whatever music. It’s just having more vocabulary, like you want to be a great writer and you discover that your vocabulary is limited, like you feel the crunch, like I want to have a place out here, I need to work on my vocabulary.”

And she is, of course, spot on. I think of the multitude of times that I wanted to get my point across in a sharp, succinct way, but couldn’t find the one word that would have allowed me to do so, instead leaning on very basic vocabulary that diluted my message. Similarly, when I play piano, there have been times when I wanted to take my playing to a new place, and although I could visualize exactly what I’d like to do, I didn’t have the technical skills to take me there.

It’s important that Spalding added the following caveat, “You don’t need to use all of it all of the time.” When my son was just learning drums and starting to come up with his own fills, I played for him the tom fills in Toto’s song, “Africa.” You know it well, but in case you need reminding, go to 1:10, 2:20 and 3:15 of the following video. 

These are three of the simplest tom fills you’ll ever hear, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any more effective. It’s important to note that Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro was among the most talented and most sought after drummers in the music industry at the time, and while he could have overcomplicated things (probably in a very tasteful and interesting way), he opted to offer simply what the song required. I imagine it’s the same in any art form. Ernest Hemmingway wrote relatively simply, but I suspect he could have rivaled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s word wizardly if he’d chosen to or needed to.

And that’s the ultimate aim of any musician, any artist or really any human being: to have the skills to express yourself in any way you see fit. If simplicity is required to express raw emotion like that of punk music, great. But if something more extravagant is needed, you can go into your bag of technical skills and do what’s required.

Who's to Blame for our Topsy Turvy World?

In a recent article by Kadeen Griffiths regarding the upcoming HBO film, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” actor Courtney B. Vance says, “The world is topsy turvy, and everyone is out for themselves. It shouldn’t be like that.” This phrase, topsy turvy, has been coming up a lot in conversation lately, because it seems as if our world has truly been turned on its head, and it’s easy to see who’s to blame.

Number 1 seeds are losing to number 8 seeds (the Blackhawks are the first NHL or NBA number one seed to ever be swept in the first round).

Fox News is now holding its hosts to a higher standard than the American public holds its elected officials.

Oscars winners are announced and then withdrawn.

The White House has gone from hosting Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder to Ted Nugent and Kid Rock.

Superbowl leads of 25 points are forfeited in a quarter and a half.

Alternative truth has become a phrase in our lexicon.

And who set the wheels in motions for this topsy turvy world? No, not Trump. He was merely a by-product. Instead, turn your attention to six days earlier during the waning minutes of November 2 when the Earth shifted slightly from its axis and allowed a little rain to fall onto Cleveland, Ohio. I’d gone to bed early that night (just as I would on November 8) and when I awoke after a brief nap, I thought to myself, “Holy shit! I don’t hear fireworks. The Cubs must have actually lost!” The lovable losers had been up 6-3 in the 7th when I called it a night feeling mildly depressed because without the Cubs, Red Sox and White Sox to make fun of, who was left except my lowly Brewers?   

And then I heard it. The sound of fireworks. Yes, the Indians had come back, ready to claim their first World Series since 1948, but a rain delay turned the fate of the world upside down that evening.

Now, my depression that night and following morning can’t compare to the sick, festering depression that much of America has felt since November 8 and will continue to feel as the country unravels, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the Cubs set the wheels in motion. 

Thanks a fricking lot, Cubbies. Enjoy your little victory dance as defending World Champions while the world crumbles all around you. You’re expected to make another playoff run this year, but hey, in this topsy turvy world you started, don’t get your hopes up.

In fact, in this topsy turvy world, my Brewers might actually have a shot.