Refreshing the Soul

—this commentary offered by the Professor—

For Christians, the season of lent is proceeding and we have just observed what in the Episcopal tradition is referred to as “Refreshment Sunday”:  on the fourth Sunday of Lent, one is given dispensation to relax one’s Lenten discipline a bit.  In other words, it’s essentially permission to change things up a bit, to note the passage of time, and to remind convince oneself that lent will soon be over.  It occurred to me that “refreshment” is what many of us desperately need on a regular basis—especially through a workplace environment that has become increasing  electronic, impersonal and time-conscious.   Alas, refreshment seems to be what we’re NOT getting.

Far more common than we like to admit. 

An article in the morning paper recently confirmed something that I had long suspected from talking with various people about the nature of our workplace environment.  It’s described as a situation in which “most” employees working in an office environment either “regularly” or “frequently” eat lunch at their desks.  It went on to describe a subcomponent of workers  (the study estimated 10%) who “occasionally” would eat all three “meals” of the day at their desks. 

As the saying goes: this is wrong in so many ways.  It’s not refreshing, and it isn’t healthy.

The issues of work hours in the United States  and the general level of pressure in office environments might be a good topic for another discussion, but what strikes me about this above information is that it give further evidence that something is wrong with the way we conceive of and execute feeding ourselves (in the good old days of this geezer, we occasionally called it dining.)  There is something amiss in our eating habits, and all you have to do is take a walk with a mental measuring tape and observe the prevailing girth of those around us (hell, us as well!) to verify this; but to begin to unravel some of these interrelated challenges, we need to step back in time a bit.

There was a time, deep in our agricultural past (and to some extent in our manual labour/manufacturing past,) in which three full meals a day were essential to replenish the sheer numbe of calories we burned off through our daily tasks.  Back close to my permanent home in Pennsylvania, the Amish still live such a lifestyle (or should we say “work such a “workstyle?”)  They are on what is sometimes called the “Amish Diet”: take enough steps a day (in traditional communities they average up about 18,000 steps per day) and you can pack away as many meals as you’d like.  In typical American cultures, however, we average less than 8,000 steps per day, and office workers as a subgroup average significantly less than that.  The “Amish Diet” of three full meals a day is—technically speaking—a gastro-intestinal mismatch with how most of us live and work.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a day with, say, only one meal in it, isn’t it?  While it would with little doubt provide us with enough calories to replace those we burn staring at a computer screen and answering e-mails, it would seem to be a component of a pretty grim existence.  Put more directly: we might not need additional calories, but we can’t be expected to grind away for 8, 9 or 10 hours with no breaks in the day, with no contour or shape to our work day.  For that  ideally is what  meal should provide in our day of limited physical activity: a break (most importantly mental); a time to shift one’s attention; a time to interact with colleagues as people rather than co-workers;  a time to take a breath, to think about the many reasons you do what you do in life, and then get back to work.  It’s the same reason we have a Sabbath in the week or holidays in the year or take time out to note the changing of the seasons: we want and need our lives to have some shape.

Hemlock for the body AND the soul. 

And this is precisely why eating at our desks is so bad.  In a similar way, it’s why that peculiar American phenomenon of the “drive-through window” is so reprehensible.  In both of these activities, we get EXACTLY the opposite of what we genuinely need.  We get plenty of calories (especially in the drive-through, but also in the vending machine products that often form the basis of our desk-centered “lunch”), but we get no real tonal, spatial, interpersonal or psychological break. 

The result: in an hour or two, we find ourselves heading for the coffee room again, to perhaps score some leftover birthday cake or grab a quick packet of crisps.  We don’t do this because we are technically hungry: someone who hits the drive-through while on the road gets nearly enough calories in just a burger and soda to power them for an entire day.  We are hungry in a more poetic sense: hungry for the mental break we didn’t give ourselves earlier; hungry for a shaping ritual that our day unconsciously needs.  Yea, I say unto you: the road to hell (and to a wider circumference) is strewn not with sinners, but with fast food drive-throughs!

A better approach to refreshment, don't you think? Lovely. 

I got to thinking about all of this after observing how a cup of tea here in England forms the basis for just what we need in this arena.  The Brits love their tea and tend to feel quite strongly about its restorative (or they might also claim curative) powers.   There’s little you can claim is wrong with you for which  the English won’t first suggest: “you just need a good cup of tea.”   Mind you, they don’t mean that you should dash out to the corner convenience store,  get a Styrofoam cup of tea and gulp it down as you drive down the road or return to your office.  The how and when of tea being prepared, served and consumed is a relatively well defined social ritual which, in turn, provides the social and psychological benefits we crave when we in the workplace decide it is time for “lunch.”  

The English will consume coffee in a purely functional way, grabbing a quick cup to help get the day started, but tea is much more—it is a way by which one’s progression through the day is marked.  When it is tea time, work stops; often people will gather together (since “elevenses” and four o’clock tea time is fairly standard); the tea will be prepared in the proper way (or as close to that ideal as practicable, but always carefully and consciously); and the tea is consumed sitting.  One other ritualized element is essential: after the first sip of tea, invariably, the description “lovely” is uttered serially by all present, with others nodding and hmmmming in affirmation.  This need not take long; sometimes this ritualized break in the day takes less than ten minutes.  But the important thing has been achieved: a true break in the day has occurred; a mental reset has been facilitated, and a moment of appreciation for the simple and familiar things which make up most of our modest lives has occurred.  We have been refreshed. The fact that tea is a virtually no-cal beverage is an additional bonus (let’s not count the milk and biscuits.)

Surely we American are innovative enough to develop an effective approach to refreshment; we can’t expect to eat our way into that feeling without some accompanying thought.  For myself, I have vowed to avoid: eating while doing anything else; eating while walking or standing; and eating without taking a moment to pray or offer thanks in another manner.  The key is in ritualizing our behaviour sufficiently for it to become an activity that is both habitual and significant.  A way to refresh ourselves that would be meaningful, social, relaxing, predictable, cheap and low calorie?  Wouldn’t that be” lovely?”

Democracy Revisited

—political wisdom from our Professor—

Democracy is born in Egypt

Democracy is a good thing, right?  This is what we’ve always been taught in our history and civic classes through school.  It is what we tell cultures around the world as they seek alternatives to despotism or single-party rule.  It is invoked in political speeches right along with motherhood, apple pie and baseball.  It must be a good thing, right?  The only trouble is, we find ourselves following the news around the world, and what we see sometimes gives us cause for pause: the “Arab Spring” brought elections to Egypt—and an increasingly radicalized Muslim Brotherhood government.  Civil unrest has followed as the Egyptian military weighs the benefit of intervening and the rioting can be ignited by something as innocuous as a football match.  The “freedom fighters” of Libya were victorious in their battle with the backers of Col. Khadaffi, but our ambassador is now dead and Libya’s resources lie in disarray.  We introduced democracy into Afghanistan, but the Karzai government seems hopelessly corrupt, not to mention its feckless behaviour as a supposed “ally” in fighting the Taliban.  Democracy seems to have its challenges around the world.

This is democracy?  Really?

Fear not, the reader must be thinking: just turn your eyes to the inventors of democracy (the Greeks….ah, we’d better not look there.  All right then, the French….well, after four tries at democracy I guess they managed to do something. Well, there is the British…but they still have the queen (God save her) and a hopelessly fractured coalition government…

Yes,   but what about the world’s most prominent and insistent advocate of democracy, the USA?  How is this democracy thing working out for us?  I would think few observers would dispute that we are caught up in a time in which it is easy to question whether our form of national government is fully up to the task.   The “fiscal cliff” melodrama merely illustrates a dysfunctional Congress that has consistently failed to deal effectively with a number of issues of grave national importance­—most particularly the budget deficit—but also issues of energy, nuclear waste disposal, immigration, and growing economic stratification.  Who among us is willing to present our current Congress and say to the people of the world: “See? You should have one of these!”

What gives?  Has democracy’s “five minutes of fame” (in historical perspective) run out?  Is its instability and deliberate inefficiency incapable of dealing with the rapidly changing, ideologically-charged times in which we live?  Given the examples presented above, one is nudged toward doubt.

In responding to the question of democracy, though, one has to subdivide the problems, for the challenges democracy presents in the middle-east, for instance, are quite different from those presented to us in the US.  There is a very intriguing theory that for democracy to work, one must have a significant and stable middle class.  In other words, for “majority rule” to work, the majority of the population needs to feel they personally have more to lose through social instability than to gain.  If one has a significant amount to lose, your “vote” is practically and pragmatically driven toward competence, stability and honesty in government (or so goes the theory.)  If you have essentially little or nothing to lose (in a material sense) your vote reflects those things that hard-pressed/hopeless people of all ages have tended to gravitate toward: religious fervour or opportunistic corruption (or, many times, both in the same package.)   Israel is the only country in the middle east with a prominent middle class; it is also the only one with a functional democracy (you might argue it is a potentially DANGEROUS democracy, but it is a functional one for better or for worse.)

But the US is nothing if not middle class, isn’t it?  I mean, even people making over 200,000 dollars insist earnestly (and perhaps accurately) that they are the epitome of middle class values.  So why is our democracy in such a seemingly sick phase (let’s hope it’s a phase and not a terminal illness!) 

The problem is that we have forgotten something very important:  America was indeed founded as a democracy, but it was founded very deliberately as a REPRESENTATIVE democracy and not a DIRECT democracy.  The fact that most of us have forgotten this is made manifestly clear every four years when the “wacky” or “inexplicable” nature of the Electoral College is discussed.  There is nothing mysterious, strange or outmoded about the Electoral College; it only seems that way to those who have forgotten our roots as a representative democracy (which means: most of us.) 

The idea embodied by the Electoral College is that we elect individuals whose judgement we trust to then take action on behalf of our nation in a manner in which they consider most positive.  They represent our general interests, but—at least initially—had no obligation to reflect our specific desires or directives.  Technically, we still vote for electors, who in turn vote for a president and vice-president, although a rigid custom has evolved in which electors declare their presidential allegiances ahead of time and invariably cast their votes for that candidate regardless of the circumstances.  The idea of representative democracy is not trivial or insignificant, for America—at its founding and now—is comprised of large numbers of sincere, hardworking individuals, many of whom are too busy or otherwise not inclined to inform themselves regarding  the complexities of running the most powerful nation on earth.  As long as they/we acknowledge this and focus on electing intelligent people of excellent character to REPRESENT us, this works out fine.  But when we start to think that watching sensationalized and heavily edited cable television qualifies us to understand the intricacies (and appropriate costs) of government, and we expect our elected representatives to DIRECTLY  reflect our specific, individual and semi-informed perspectives, we get into hot water.

If we all have to vote on every issue, is there
any time left to drink fine Scotch?

If you look at all of our fifty states, and determine which of them is least functional, California would probably be near the top of most lists.  And it’s no coincidence that California was the first state to overtly apply direct democracy through its ballot initiative process.  Perhaps one of the most famous of these ballot initiative was “proposition 13” proposed by one Harold Jarvis, which set a permanent, constitutionally mandated limit on property taxes.  This fashion of ad-hoc direct democracy seems fine for a while (especially when opening your revised tax bill) but there is no way that such initiatives can respond to changing circumstances (just one example: the Americans with Disabilities Act imposed huge mandated spending on states) or fluctuating economic circumstances.  Ross Perot, when a candidate for president, was quite fond of declaring things to be “just that simple,” which sounded fine—except that it wasn’t and isn’t usually true.

This is how you must spend your free time
if you don't let representative leaders do their jobs

California is a mess, and the entire US is following close behind.  Wisconsin recently conducted a shrill and wasteful “recall” election of their governor—justified on the basis of being “responsive” to the people.  Our electronically connected world has given all of us a megaphone; we use it, and we expect our representatives to hear us.  Fine so far.  But when our “representatives” start to engage in silly stunts like website “voting” on specific bills, recall elections to even political scores and simplistic one-issue “pledges” cooked up by Grover Norquist, we are in trouble.  Our Representatives in congress (if they still deserve that description) increasingly behave as if we were founded as a direct democracy, voting in whichever fashion they perceive the “American Public” to think.  The health of the nation is an afterthought; the health of their political careers is the forethought. 

But we can’t blame them, really.  The unfortunate fact is that party activists are increasingly strident and ideological in their impulses, and increasingly selective about the information upon which they determine their positions.  And they vote accordingly in party primaries, expecting their representatives to directly reflect their ideological stance at all times.  The only way to hinder the harmful effects of these zealots, in a democracy, is to outnumber them.  We simply must find a way to broaden our major parties’ active base in such a way that a more moderate and informed perspective prevails; a perspective that acknowledges that in a representative democracy, we must look for candidates of broad and flexible mind, capable of representing out general interests through rapidly changing circumstances. 

Right now, playing to the zealots who dominate nominating primaries, candidates demonstrate just the opposite traits to those needed my representative democracy: they issue very specific solutions (that will never happen), make very specific promises, and sign ridiculous and rigid “pledges.” They essentially take any discretionary authority away from themselves before they get elected.  They seem either ignorant of how representative democracy works, or too afraid to argue for the prerogatives necessary to be a true representative. 

What would democracy look like if we reawakened the representative roots of our democracy, if we found a way to overtly empower our elected representatives to exercise discretion and judgement in their voting, whether in Congress or in things like the Electoral College?  I have a theory: an electoral college composed of generally respected, broadly informed citizens elected on the basis of their broad judgement by their individual states may never have elected George W. Bush.  And who knows, maybe they would have elected John McCain president knowing that his chief disqualification (the presence of Sarah Palin on the ticket) could have been easily avoided by an electoral college willing to ignore modern protocol, and split the ticket to elect Joe Biden vice-president. (Maybe we could have had George H.W. Bush and Lloyd Bensten?)  It’s called exercising informed discretion….couldn’t we use a bit more of that in our government?

Let’s bring back representative democracy…democracy seems to be in need of it.

Call me Sir

This is not me. Yet. 

Somewhere along the path into my advancing geezerhood, I became a "sir."

It is a puzzling transition, and I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment when it occurred. My qualifications as a dignified professional are tenuous at best, and in the years up until now my relatively disheveled and haphazard way of being in the world hasn't made me a natural "sir", even in the eye of waiters and other service workers. High end doctors and lawyers get addressed as sir. I've always been far more anonymous in the world than that. If strangers addressed me at all, it was very rarely as "sir." Sometimes I'd get a "mister", but rarely anything more deferential than that.  But in the last few years something has changed.

Strangers now frequently address me as "sir" during routine social interactions, even though nothing particularly has changed in my social presentation to the world. I mean, it's not like I started wearing top-hats and wing-tip shoes. The circumstances are telling and are evidence that, indeed, I am now firmly entrenched in the geezer demographic.

"Sir, you dropped your glove on the street."  (A teenage boy crossing the street after me.) "Sir, you've dropped the other one now.  And your scarf is on the ground, too." (Clumsy absent-mindedness is a central feature of my geezerhood.")

"Sir, your zipper is open"  (I quickly look down at the front of my my trousers, but the young fellow then laughs and says that he was referring to the zipper on my shoulder pack, where my passport and expensive laptop are hanging out for the world to see.)

"Have a good day, sir."  (This from the bus driver as I disembark at my office stop. I'm the only one who gets this treatment, and it's likely because, in my old-school background, I routinely thank the bus driver for the ride every day. This is not protocol for anyone younger than geezer age, I've noticed.)

"Would you like to take this seat, sir?  You look tired."  (This from a pretty young woman on the bus. This was particularly surprising, since I was raised in a manner that requires men to abandon seats to women, not the other way around.  To have a young professional woman offer me her seat made me feel my weary geezerhood like nothing else.)

"Sorry for the error on your tab, sir. Yes, you had only four shots of Scotch, not five."  (Certainly the fact that I now pay attention both to consumption of spirits and the accuracy of my bar tabs is a sympton of geezerhood.)

"What did you want to talk about, sir.  Did I do something wrong?"  (From a young editor—all of whom seem fretful that older supervisors are there to scold, rather than just chip in their $5 for the March Madness basketball wagering pool.)

In any case, I've now reached that stage where "buddy," "pal", and "dumb-ass" and all the other appellations once heard from strangers have now been replaced more often than not by "sir."

And when "sir" begins, can "take it easy, old fella" be far behind?

"

London Reflection

—a Mercurious observation from March 1—

A London train station is a perfect microcosm of London itself. Today I checked out of my hotel and made my way to Liverpool Street station, on my way to Norwich to visit a fellow Geezer and his family. With 30 minutes to kill before the train departed, I trudged down the stairs to the public restroom. The cost for using the lue is 30p, and after sorting through a handful of change to identify 10p and 20p coins, I paused near the side of the restroom entry lobby and watched the crowd.

There were perhaps a hundred people milling about, some entering, some leaving the restroom There were all types represented, all nationalities—exactly like London itself. While I was waiting, five different foreign nationals approached me, mistaking me for a Brit who could help them pick out their own 30p fee from the handful of change they had. (This in itself tells you how friendly the British people are to visitors—in New York, foreign visitors would soon learn to be wary of asking natives for help.)  Within five minutes,  a Chinese business man, two round Ethiopian women, a fellow I believe was Portuguese, and a woman who was probably from Somalia all approached me for help picking out their restroom change.

Liverpool St. Station, north London

The restroom attendant was offering similar help to others in the crowd. He himself was Indian or Pakistani, his shiny black hair tied back in a ponytail. He was exceedingly patient with the crowd, and especially so to the elderly British couples, whose problem wasn’t identifying the proper coin combinations, but figuring out how to insert them into the coin-operated turnstiles. These older Brits kept wanting to hand the coins to the attendant, and couldn’t quite figure out the mechanisms of the turnstiles.  Covering the floor were perhaps 200 pigeons flowing among the human feet, pecking about for crumbs of food,yet somehow never getting stepped on. It was utter chaos, yet at the same time a well organized chaos.

London is one of my favorite cities, for this exact reason. There is no more cosmopolitan city on earth. Walk a busy neighborhood for two hours at night, and you will hear snatches of Farsi, the clicking dialects of subcontinental Africa,  all manner of Romance languages, the guttural tones of Russian and Finland,  and the occasional American twang from the southwest region. British English is certainly heard less often than the sum total of foreign languages spoken.

The visual types are equally diverse. The Brits themselves seem to be of two classes: ruddy-faced elderly British couples wearing raincoats with tweed caps and sturdy walking shoes, walking with canes; and mod young people, painfully thin with tight trousers and thin pointed shoes, and haircuts cut close and stylishly so to produce an androgynous look that makes it hard to distinguish male from female.

Among the foreigners, the young, wealthy Indian women almost always walk in pairs. They wear very expensive and stylish western clothes, precisely applied makeup, and top-of-the line perfumes that linger in the air for just a few moments after they pass you on the street. They are insanely beautiful, with sleek long hair that could not be any blacker yet at the same time seems to reflect every color of the rainbow.

They are in sharp contrast to many of the African women, who are round of face and figure, and often dress in styles of their home countries, with colorful wraps and  headwear. They are interesting and beautiful, too, but in a different way.

The many Asian people are oddly anonymous, as they don’t seem to speak all that much, and seem to be intent on not being visible at all. The exception are those who are clearly businessman. Asian business men often dress in suits, shoes and overcoats that are clearly very, very expensive.

There is a class of teenager and young adult that spans national boundaries. They wear Goth or neomilitary styles, with heavy black books, metal chains, combat trousers, Mohawk haircuts, body piercings and tattoos of all kinds. Yet for all their attempts to look fearsome and threatening, these young people seem utterly harmless.

London is a unique city for its almost perfect mixture of organization and chaos. Paris is very stylish and beautiful, but there is something a little haughty and antiseptic about it. Frankfurt and other German cities are beautiful in an old world way, but they are so carefully organized and precise that some of the life is squeezed out of them. Rome is another of my favorite cities, as I very much like the creative chaos and pure happiness that seems to emanate from the culture. But I can see how the frantic chaos could wear you out if you lived in Rome.

London, on the other hand, is a fairly perfect mixture of control and chaos, and aside from the high cost of living, it would not be at all hard for me to live here. And there is also the polite friendliness of the city, which is truly unique in my experience of large cities. If, as a pedestrian for example, a cab honks at you, it is almost certainly because you have done something foolishly dangerous. Bus drivers in London are invariably polite if you’re confused about the fare or proper use of an Oyster metro card.

As I was waiting from the train station today, the big schedule board was slow posting the platform from which my train was leaving. From a distance of thirty yards or so, a gatekeeper noticed my momentary puzzlement as I stood among a crowd of thirty people or so, and he left his post to approach me.  He studied my reservation sheet. “Yes sir, your train always leaves from platform 12. They really should have posted it by now. They have just finished cleaning your train, so please follow me and I’ll point out your carriage.”

Can you imagine this kind of thing at Grand Central in Manhattan?  

Observations from a Geezer in Management

Over the last few years, International business travel has become less fun, and in my opinion the parties responsible for this are Microsoft, Apple, and the other leading edge technology companies.

Time was when travel was an opportunity for business people to go incognito for a short while, at least while in transit to and from the destination meetings. For myself, anyway (since I have a strong contemplative nature that borders on the ani-social) a business trip offered a refreshing opportunity to go off the grid for a little while and temporarily drop the responsibility of bossing people around. There used to be a nice element of anonymity to business travel that made it a freeing experience for me, and undoubtedly for the people who have to work with me daily.

But these days there is really no such thing as being off-the-grid for most business travelers, and connectedness in the blu-tooth era is now so ingrained that there is virtually no difference between sitting in your own office with underlings 20 feet away and managing them from the back row of a sales conference 4,000 miles away in London.  We have already had two live-meeting video  teleconferences with the home office that are virtually indistinguishable from meetings held in person. Except for the time difference, there’s now not much difference between meetings where everybody sits in the room at the same time, and those where the attendees are in three separate continents.

More’s the pity. This kind of business culture might be good for business in the immediate sense: don’t all managers reward those people who slavishly  put in more hours than the job requires?  But I don’t think it’s particularly good for people and likely not really good for business in the longer term. My staff could undoubtedly use some relief from my constant participation, just as I could use a break from my own boss’s micromanagement.  Americans work a hell of a lot, and the impact of this obsession is not better results. We’d be better off, I think, if our business leaders used their weekends to get way from work and recharge with the goal of doing better work in fewer hours, and if they encouraged others to do likewise  More hours only rarely lead to more genuine productivity, after all. But like most good modern people in the private business world today,  I answered emails at 10:30 last night, and at 5:00 am  this morning.

For this entire morning I’ve been directing employees from afar via computer, signing contracts and approvals, and otherwise making myself a huge pest to staff members who, I imagine, were looking for a break from my meddling while I was gone. My email browser can tell me, in an instant, which of the employees are using their computers at any given moment. If I was being really diligent, I would be making some notes on which employees seem to be slacking off today.  Alas, in the modern business environment, the cat is never away, and the mice don’t get to play all that much.

I have told people, though, that I will be truly off the grid early next week when I travel north of London to visit another geezer (our esteemed and grumpy Professor) and his lovely wife.  Secretly, I hope the home office has some fun in those days when I’m not in touch, and perhaps take an extended lunch or two and leaves a little early if spring starts early in Minneapolis. I have to pretend to be sternly disapproving of this behavior, but quietly, it makes me smile with subversive approval.