I Could Never Sell

Hi N:

Em loves to fish, but I find it difficult, nearly as difficult as meditation: my mind keeps trying to run off, like an addict for information maybe, or a word addict, craving the Internet.

No, nothing to do with Internet, now that I think of it. When I was at grad school at Princeton one year I hiked the Appalachian trail through Delaware with a friend from inner-city Chicago, and my mind went through withdrawal symptoms after all the reading. I began to read and reread every tiny word on our candy wrappers and such. Something in my mind went into reverse after the first day without input, and began to pull things from memory that I had not thought of in years.

I wonder if that’s why I love Em so madly. With no one else am I so fascinated that I can spend hours alone with her, just wondering what she is and what she will be. She and I hiked half a day on the Appalachian near home in early summer, through a swamp on wooden treads, and she darted off the trail after dragonflies and snakes and salamanders and what not. I would never let her shriek or be silly about bugs and such when she was little, and now she will hand me creatures that make *my* skin crawl.

She got off the schoolbus one day and asked me What is a tomboy? Knowing this could be a giant question to her, I answered in a breezy way that a tomboy is a girl who can do anything, girl stuff and boy stuff, depending on how she feels at the time, and will climb a tree if she likes, or shoot a basketball, and not always be stopped by a dress or a manicure that might be smudged. Sometimes, but not always.

When talk turns to vacation, I always look North, towards cold country and ice, while everyone else is looking South to hot sands.

Walking is one thing I miss most about my years in Manhattan. I walked everywhere, miles and miles. You don’t see many fat people in Manhattan. Obesity correlates with distance from urban centers and driving time, I hear, and I can believe it. I don’t care for driving, and sold my car when I went to Manhattan. My father still cannot understand that. When I was little he would pile us into the car on any pretext and we would explore the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California through car windows. He loved cars and driving. I think as a former orphan he felt the wonder of having a way to go wherever he wanted whenever he wanted….

The Internet… can, like anything, be used in behalf of the best in us or the worst, our withdrawal or our engagement. When I was a grad student at Columbia, in an apartment looking over the Hudson on Morningside Heights, I made friends with a very young Mormon couple from Utah. They were, in effect, visiting another planet. These were the earliest days of the Internet, and I had just left IBM, so I went online and found her a group that she could meet with every week, in person of course, sitting in a circle in someone’s apartment: a group of passionate knitters in Manhattan!

I saw then that the Internet would be far larger than its technology, and connect people of every kind, not just lovers of technology and loners. I write a blog subtitled Adventures in Aversion, a provocative way of saying that I look for people who see things differently than I do, or set my teeth on edge, and I don’t stop until I can see things as they do, for the moment at least, and even see me as they do…

93% of communication is non-verbal, you mention. Ouch, you’ve touched a sore spot. I was years learning that, with many bumps and knocks and stumbles. Now I’m a master at reading someone from a block away… I fought that idea (with my father, too, the psych PhD) because I’m better with words than anything else. Fear, that is. Fears shape our lives, don’t they? You’ve heard of those iPhone apps that tell you by satellite when people and places you like are nearby? I think we have something like that built into us, but in reverse. We turn our steps away from the slightest whiff of uncertainty or unfamiliarity, and begin to wear bare the same few paths through a giant teeming world. Long before any Internet or technology, right?

The Internet is only what we make it. Like anything. We are responsible.

You mention a personality test… Yes, tell me more please. I warn you though, I learned from my father (who gave me the WISC on my fourth birthday and every second year thereafter) to distrust the idea of self. I learned that not as an idea or theory, but because I saw how many different people he was in one lifetime, and I could not stay angry at him even when my sister would get angry at me for not sharing her anger, because I did not believe in “him”, he was now too far distant from the person we remembered, and from the orphan before that.

Later I knew that in myself (and would thank him for giving me the clue): in high school I could not bear to walk to the front of the class and talk about a book I had read. At IBM I flew to five states and talked half a day to standing-room-only crowds, with music and lights. I remember walking to the front one such day and thinking Wow, is this me, the guy who couldn’t give a book report?

That for me has been the greatest thrill in life, going beyond who I thought I could be, and saying Wow, is this the same guy? Because no, it’s not the same guy, it’s not me, there is no me, Me is hiding place we scrape together the way a mouse stuffs twigs and pebbles together under a rock, to dart out for its food without becoming food to a hawk. That’s what I mean when I say that I now see fears shaping our lives. First, fears shape the Me, our idea of ourselves, and make the Me into a hiding place from the big world.

So what did the DiSC say of you? Let me guess. You are a leader in the eyes of many people your age and younger and all ages. I hear that in your weekly routine. Patients looking up at you from chairs and beds, students looking down at you from amphitheater seating… You make yourself highly visible much of your time.

I got the oddest feeling once when my son, my first child, was six months old. Until then I thought he was clay that I should shape into a monument to myself. That day I saw in his eyes that someone was there already, and holding me to account, expecting more and better from me than I could yet see or suspect. Almost overnight I stopped cursing, not because I had taken an oath or made a project of it, but because I saw him trying to learn this difficult English language from me, and Damn and Shit and such are grown-up variations of Whaaa-Whaaa-Whaaa, the wails of a baby, and he didn’t need the sounds of a baby from me….

In Manhattan I led coaching classrooms for two years, training other coaches (life coaches, business coaches, personal coaches) two evenings a month for four hours an evening, sometimes in front of as many as 125, more often half that, and then coaching new coaches individually through the week. Much more challenging than lecturing for IBM, because now the topic could be anything, at any moment. I had a script to cover in the time given me, but I also took open-ended challenges and walked down the aisles from a one-foot stage with my microphone. I miss that more than anything, because I had that Is-This-Me sense of wonder about it.

Funny movie on this, though: Little Miss Sunshine….

Did I start to answer your question? Your very interesting question? So next you’ll tell me where the DiSC surprised you, if it did?

Your turn.

J-

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