And a River Runs Through It

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Terry Young

I was reminded of the power of water on a pilgrimage of sorts to my hometown this summer. Having lived in the desert for four years – where a mere eight inches of rain per year is considered normal – I was struck by how green and lush Missouri was. And by the calming effect of the cool, clear streams that flowed through the valleys of my youth.

The dearth of water in Phoenix causes people to rush to the window when it rains, pressing their noses to the pane. It feels like settlers on a remote prairie, rushing outside to catch a glimpse of a long-overdue stagecoach. A month after moving here, I laughed when I saw people do this. Now I do it too.

On that trip back home, I took this photo of Marble Creek, which passed serenely through the farms of both sets of my grandparents when I was growing up.

I spent days as a teenager wading it, fishing for smallmouth bass with crawdads I caught in the creek for bait. This creek is where we used to skinny dip every year on Groundhog Day for reasons that totally escape me now. This creek also runs behind the cemetery where my parents, grandparents and great grandparents are buried.

I sat at this spot for a couple of hours reflecting on where I had grown up, remembering my family, and considering the adventures that lay ahead. The soundtrack to my reverie was the gentle music of the water cascading over the rocks and a cicada symphony. A smell of cedar was in the breeze.

It would be boastful to refer to that terrain as mountainous or to the waterways as rivers. Hills and creeks are a more honest description — and more in keeping with the modest, self-effacing temperament of the Midwest.

As I think back, it also would have been pretentious to bring a fly rod into any of these waters; a Zebco 33 was about as sophisticated as we got.

It was in a creek very much like this one that I was baptized in the spring of my eighth year. Linus Penturf, the pastor at Stouts Creek Missionary Baptist Church, waded with me out into the water and immersed me as my parents, the small congregation and a school of bluegill witnessed the entire event. Even in that most reverent of moments, I recall thinking I would have to come back later with my rod and reel.

So it was no surprise when Robert Redford’s beautiful film, A River Runs Through It, hooked me from the very first line: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

The movie is an adaptation of a Norman MacLean story about his Montana childhood –much of which was spent fly fishing on the majestic Big Blackfoot River.

In A River Runs Through It, the taciturn father, played by Tom Skerrit, is a Presbyterian minister who describes Methodists as “Baptists who could read.” My spiritual journey continues to take me far beyond that chilly creek, partly because — as Tom Skerrit’s character would have asserted — I learned to read.

Since Missouri is a long way from any coastline, and since my parents were wary of venturing beyond Iron County, I was out of high school before I first saw the ocean. It was the Atlantic as seen from the shores of New Jersey – which is not the garden state their license plates would have you believe. But the memory that remains is a powerful one:

To a ceaseless cymbal crash of waves, Bill Latham and I ran along the beach, as if drawing energy from the ocean itself.

I now have gazed from the pier at Lake Michigan, dipped my hand into the Dead Sea and walked the footpaths of the Cinque Terre overlooking the Mediterranean. I have flown over the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian oceans — and the view from 30,000 feet makes me distrust big water. An ocean is an anonymous, indifferent crowd. But a creek has a personality, a sense of humor and a touch of liquid grace.

I think Norman MacLean would agree, based on how he ended his story:

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Mind Like Water

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Terry Young

Several years ago, I went to an exhibition of sketches by Francisco Goya, and was struck by the image that accompanies this blog. Appropriately entitled Man Carrying a Huge Load, I recognized the feeling expressed in that simple ink sketch.

I recognized it because it was me carrying my bulging briefcase back and forth from work to home every day.

Like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up a hill just to watch it roll back down, I lugged home heavy stacks of paper night after night. The burden I carried was a hodgepodge of things to be thrown away, time bombs in the form of urgent actions I hadn’t captured anywhere, and things that simply needed filing.

Each evening, I had the lofty vision of making headway on that stack which, in truth, had haunted me in one form or another my entire working career. More often than not, I lugged it back to work the next day – untouched.

A similar moment of recognition occurred a few years earlier while watching The Mission, the 1986 movie about the work of the Jesuits in South America. Captain Mendoza, played by Robert Deniro, killed his own brother and, in penance, drags a heavy parcel of weapons from his former life as a mercenary up a steep Amazon mountain.

It sometimes felt as if the physical exertion of carrying that briefcase – which often blossomed into two briefcases and a carryon suitcase – was penance for not having done anything with them. When someone would comment on my “luggage,” I would joke that, “This is the only exercise I get.” (That’s a topic for a future blog…)

This sense of overload wasn’t just coming from stacks of papers. The deluge of emails we all endure also added psychic weight.

The avalanche of email peaked for me this spring just after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. It was if the earthquake had also spawned a tsunami of emails. At one point, I had more than 3,000 messages, with more than 2,000 of those unread.

Like many of you, my bookshelves had become a graveyard for the latest treatises on improving performance. I studied Covey’s habits, spent sixty seconds on the One Minute Manager and lusted after the thought of The 4-hour Workweek.

But in the end, my stack continued to grow, my emails piled up and my sense of accomplishment waned in proportion.

I paint this bleak picture intentionally to put into stark relief the change I have gone through in the past month. This is going to sound like an infomercial if I’m not careful, but I recently read a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done that has changed my life.

Want proof?

I went from more than 2,000 work e-mails to zero. That’s right – zero, zip, nada, zilch. The stacks of paper – which had taken on the form of an archaeological dig – are all gone. The trash has been trashed, the actions have been captured and the reference material has been filed away. Not even a sticky note in sight.

Last time I could say that was, well, uh….never.

So how did I achieve this radical shift?

In a nutshell, Getting Things Done is about setting up a process to capture all the things you need to do – so you can get them off your mind. Allen describes this as achieving “mind like water,” a phrase found in Zen literature that refers to a state of mind not encumbered by all the things our minds “think” we should be doing. This enables us to focus on the moment, responding fully to whatever is happening right now.

As Allen says, our minds are really kind of stupid. We have thoughts about open action items whether we are in a position to do anything about them or not – which triggers stress.

To get those things out of the RAM of our conscious mind, it is necessary to put them into a simple, yet comprehensive system we can trust will remind us about them at the right moment. It entails thinking about each project you have – determining the desired outcome – and then identifying the next step you need to take to move that project closer to completion.

The final step is to review these lists of projects and next steps as often as needed to keep them “off your mind.”

Got a “to do” list?

I did. It was a 400-item blob of amorphous phrases. I hadn’t done the simple task of thinking through the next physical action that needed to happen to move the project forward.

As a result, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of that murky list, I spent any “free” time perusing my mountain of emails looking for quick hits to make myself feel productive. But my “important but not urgent” projects languished from neglect.

The fallacy of that approach, of course, is that important projects that languish become urgent, important projects – which is the textbook recipe for the stressful life I had cooked up for myself.

And that stack of papers that mocked me from the corner of my desk? Through the rocket science idea of setting up a filing system of alphabetized manila folders, every scrap of paper that I might need someday is filed away. It’s key that the folders are in a cabinet at arm’s reach. Otherwise, I’d be tempted yield to the old habit of stacking things on my desk.

This Train is Departing. Please Hold On.

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Terry Young

The old couple stepped onto the train tentatively.

Frail and unsure, they inched their way onto the people mover at the Atlanta airport that would take them to Terminal A. They made it on just as the androgynous computer voice warned, “The doors are closing….. Stop…… Do not enter.”

The passengers scooted back, adjusting their carry-on luggage to make room for the late arrivals.

Moments before, a mother cradling a newborn baby had boarded the train with her sister, who was pushing a toddler in a stroller.

Standing in the middle of the train car, out of reach of the vertical poles, the older man motioned for his wife to hold onto one of the straps hanging from the ceiling for balance.

Just as she reached up for a strap that was high above her — too high — the next digitized voice announcement came on:

“This train is departing….Please hold on.”

In a flash, it was clear what was about to happen.

The Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, besides having a name that is three words too long, is the world’s busiest airport. At 90 million passengers annually, that’s about 250,000 travelers each day.

A system of multi-car people movers is used to transport this mass of humanity efficiently through the airport’s six concourses. In service for 30 years, the train recently was the subject of an official naming contest.

Airport authorities wanted to differentiate it from the two other trains operating at the airport — the new ATL SkyTrain, which connects the terminal to the rental car center, and the MARTA train station, which connects to the citywide transit system.

So what was the winning entry that netted the train-namer a $100 American Express gift card?

The “Plane Train.” Kind of a plain name.

I would have preferred the submission from a fan of “The Colbert Report,” the Comedy Central news program, who proposed the train be dubbed COLBERT – Carrier of Lovely Beautiful Excited Ready Travelers.

But there was nothing plain about the scene I witnessed on the Plane Train this morning.

As if choreographed, the train accelerated abruptly at the precise moment the old woman reached up for the elusive ceiling strap. In slow motion, she lost her balance and fell back against her husband who was also without any support.

He fell backward onto the stroller of the toddler who was terrified by the sense of his world crashing in on him.

Faster than I could see it happen, hands reached out from every direction. Arms supported the old man and kept him from falling further onto the shrieking toddler.

The man and his wife hung suspended above the floor, in a net of arms of all colors.

As my eyes followed that human chain of arms back to the source of its stability, I saw one man who was making all this possible.

He was holding onto a vertical pole with his left hand, and with his right he had reached out and made a firm connection, anchoring the entire chain of supporters.

This time, it was his calm, human voice, reassuringly announcing, “It’s okay. I have you.”

For reasons I don’t fully understand, my eyes are welling up again as I type this on the plane home – touched deeply as I have been each time my mind has gone back to that moment.

I guess it is the power of being profoundly reminded once again of two simple truths:

In the blink of an eye, things fall apart.
But just as quickly, people extend a hand to people in need.

This train has departed. Someone will need your steadying hand. Please hold on.

And I Love You So

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Terry Young

After more than 29 years of marriage, my wife Lea and I have come to the conclusion that for a marriage to be successful – only one person can be crazy at a time. You can alternate who’s being crazy, but it’s a one- at-a-time thing. If she’s acting loony, I just have to wait my turn.

Another realization has been that it helps if you agree on the big stuff. For us, our half-joking mantra of, “no pets, no plants, no kids” has served us pretty well.

It’s amazing, really, to think that a couple — both at the ripe old age of 22 — could make an informed decision about how they want to spend their next 60 or 70 years. The key to that leap of faith has to be a willingness to let each other grow and evolve.

A friend wrote this toast recently for his son’s wedding that says it well:

Dance and play and rejoice in life. In your togetherness, let there be space.

Love each other unconditionally and steadfastly, but embrace the person they are, not who you want them to be. Let your love be like the moving seas between the shores of your souls.

As I reflect back on the role models I had for matrimony, the influences for a successful relationship go back a long way.

Going through files of my parents’ old photos and cards, I recently found a handwritten note from my dad to my mom. It was a love note – pure and simple.

It touched me for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that my dad was shy and not prone to talk about his feelings.

Dearest Evelyn,

I’ve decided to try and write on paper how I feel about you. I remember our courting days – when I could hardly wait to come and see you and didn’t want to leave you when it was time to go. Even now I hate to leave to go to work, and I can hardly wait to get home to see you.

I know we don’t have much money, but that’s not as important as being with you.

Eddie

I’m not sure what the occasion was; maybe it was a note slipped inside an anniversary card. I’ll never know, but I certainly understand why my mom kept it.

It reminds me of the lyrics from Bless My Soul, a song from Jeff Black’s wonderful CD, B Sides and Confessions:

I know why the baby cries
its way into the arms of a mother’s love.
I know why true love survives
and it is more than the red hot fire of another’s touch.

Sometimes life takes unanticipated turns, and you find yourself married but physically apart. There have been a few occasions in which a new job took me to a different city and Lea stayed behind to complete a teaching contract. For those who have done it, you know the difficulty of being apart for an extended period.

I will always remember the long summer of 1988, when Lea was studying for several weeks in Costa Rica on a Fulbright grant. It was 1,843 miles from San Jose to Russellville, Arkansas, and with no cell phones and limited ability to communicate, it felt further. During that time, I decided to record a version of And I Love You So, a Don McLean song sung at our wedding. The project filled my nights and weekends and hearing that recording today still brings back that sense of separation and longing for reconnection.

Shortly after my grandfather died, I remember talking with my Grandma Nola on the front porch of my uncle’s house. It was evening and the cars and trucks were traveling along I-70 in the distance. I asked her if she was going to be okay, and my diminutive grandmother said, “I’ll be fine. I have broad shoulders.”

This was just a few days after I had stood next to her at my grandfather’s casket. As she wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, she said, “I don’t regret a thing.” I realize now she wasn’t talking to me.

In the end, it wasn’t a decision we made 29 years ago to stay together no matter what. It was about choosing a person you loved, looking forward to who they would become and deciding day after day to continue the adventure. It is this same reaffirmation that Kentucky poet Wendell Berry makes in a poem to his wife entitled, The Wild Rose:

Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual
I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart.

Suddenly you flare again in my sight
A wild rose at the edge of the thicket

where yesterday there was only shade

And I am blessed and choose again,
That which I chose before.

Mending Your Japanese Bowl

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Terry Young

Everybody hurts – REM drummer Bill Berry.

Everything hurts – Italian filmmaker Michaelangelo Antonioni.

Everywhere it hurts, put an end to painful cracking – Internet ad for IncrediCreme.

Back in 2007, in the short span of 43 days: my father died, my wife had brain surgery, and my mother died. It occurred to me I should just stop answering the phone because it seemed each call just brought more painful news.

I met a woman last week whose husband once faced the dilemma of being with his father who was having surgery for a brain aneurysm or with her as she was giving birth to their second child.

You could insert your own story here – or ones of people you know. And every saga would support Thomas Hobbes’ assertion in his work Leviathan that the life of man is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

But Minnesota singer-songwriter Peter Mayer puts a different spin on life’s calamities. His new CD, Heaven Below, includes a song called Japanese Bowl, in which he compares the results of ordeals he has endured to kintsugi, the Japanese craft of mending ceramics with gold lacquer resin. Here’s my version of Mayer’s song:

Rather than attempting to repair a cracked bowl in a way that hides the flaw, a Japanese kintsugi craftsman would use the shiny compound to repair the cracks while leaving behind a decorative history of the bowl’s damage. Here are examples: http://www.kintsugi.jp/gallery.html.

Mayer contends that, as with people, no two bowls fracture exactly the same way, so the repairs accentuated by the gold lines set each piece apart as unique – and more valuable as a result.

More valuable because of the cracks? Not a concept likely to catch on in our disposable culture.

But a 2009 exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum, “Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics,” revealed just how beautifully pottery shards could be reconstructed. It is said this repair technique was so highly esteemed in 15th century Japan that some actually broke their best ceramics on purpose just so they could be mended in gold.

Cracks? Yeah, I’ve got a few. So do you. Sometimes our painful experiences leave visible reminders, but more often than not we work hard to keep them beneath the surface. I suppose it’s an attempt to maintain the illusion we’re passing through this great ordeal unscathed.

And that’s often fairly easy to pull off, as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, “Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.” When injured, we’re taught early to “walk it off,” a playground version of Nietzsche’s adage, “that which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

My wife broke her foot several years ago in a misstep off a street curb in New Orleans. The day is memorable for many reasons – but especially for the otherworldly Cirque du Soleil performers milling about the lobby of our hotel where my wife waited for me to transport her to the trauma center of the Tulane University Hospital – where we spent hours.

On a recent visit to a podiatrist, she saw the tell-tale remnants of that old injury on an x-ray of her foot – the area of the break had a “fracture callus” a little larger than the surrounding bone.

Internet discussions drone on about whether broken bones actually knit back stronger at the point of the break. The bottom line from orthopedic studies is that the fracture site is no more or less likely to break again.

This leads me to question Hemingway’s message in A Farewell to Arms that, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Our strength isn’t at our broken places – our strength comes from the realization that it is the same thread of gold that knits together my brokenness and yours.

Or to put it another way – taking liberties with the meaning of Namaste – that which is broken in me recognizes that which is broken in you as well – and in that we can find strength.