Loved this recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, a profile of a Canadian engineer, (now there’s a doubly invisible category!) who designs bridges:
If his work didn’t keep him up so late, he would probably wake up in the middle of the night worrying about it. He points out that the catastrophic 2007 collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis—which he wasn’t involved in—happened during construction work.
Mr. Johnson shows off a gray ring on his right pinkie: “It’s called the iron ring,” he says. In Canada, civil engineers wear the iron ring on their drawing hand as a symbol of their oath to protect life and limb. “We have to make sure everything we do is infallible,” he says.
I love the physical reminder, worn every day after graduation, that a civil engineer has chosen to create things that millions of us rely on every day to be functional and safe.
English: A Canadian Engineer’s Iron Ring, Stainless Steel Version. This is a picture of the author’s personal iron ring, received at the University of Waterloo, Camp 15, on February 17, 2004 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I really like this tradition of making a public (and/or) physical vow of responsibility.
My first husband was a physician. I attended his graduation from McGill medical school and watched his class, aloud, recite together the Hippocratic Oath, which begins with “First, do no harm.” It was powerful, moving and unforgettable. Every graduating physician says these words.
Even if they do do harm, and it happens to many of them in the course of a career, they all know they made a vow now to.
I wish — how I wish! — there were similar public, shared, hallowed rituals for every profession and field of endeavor. Especially finance, politics and journalism, three fields whose decisions can profoundly alter the lives and fortunes of millions of others, people who depend on them for wisdom, good faith and honesty.
I think there’s a comforting fantasy that being “successful” = easy.
As in, life suddenly smooths out into something calm, cool, stress-free.
Awesome! Sign me the hell up!
While in Tucson, I’ve gotten to know some of the Institute students, as well as some of the Times and Boston Globe staffers here working with them. In a long and personal conversation with one local student, a 21-year-old man who is already well-launched in journalism, he wondered why I still struggle.
Aren’t I successful?
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see “success” as a specific and final destination, and if it is, I wonder if that’s really the best way to look at it.
He asked me to define success. (No pressure!) My answer was very different from what it would have been in my 20s (career!), 30s (marriage!), 40s (finding a new partner/husband). As readers of this blog well know, I tend to be driven, ambitious and obsessive.
But success for me today looks quite different. It’s the hard-earned blend of a healthy retirement fund, a lovely second husband, good friends, health, a nice home and — oh, yeah — work! That order surprised me even as I wrote it, but the sub-conscious is a powerful little thing, isn’t it?
Maybe it’s being Canadian or being a Baby Boomer or having lived in five countries or being a journalist whose industry is “in disruption” — (fucking total chaos is more like it!) But I never expect life to be easy.
I wish it were easier, certainly. Struggle is wearying and distracting. Struggle without any visible, measurable progress is deeply dispiriting.
But just because something is difficult — your friendships, marriage, school, work, workouts — doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing.
It doesn’t mean you’re not succeeding.
I suspect that most of us rarely publicly admit to struggle; it’s not sexy or slick and it can make us appear ill-prepared or incompetent or dis-organized.
I call bullshit.
Life is sometime just really damn hard. The more we’re willing to be, (optimistically, resourcefully), candid about this with one another, the easier it gets, because then people with wisdom can help (some of them) and our struggle diminishes.
Not everyone is kind or compassionate, of course. But the people who sneer at the notion of struggle, glibly insisting that their path to glory has been 100 percent smooth, are usually lying — or their path is short, flat and well-paved, if not well-funded by others.
Ignore them.
One of the editors here said something to me at breakfast I found helpful and comforting. When I told her how many of us in this industry, certainly those over 40, are scrambling to “reinvent” ourselves, she suggested that this struggle, and it really is a struggle, is something attractive, not repellent.
Not if you’re about to lose your home and plunge into destitution, but having to figure stuff out, no matter if you’re 21 or 71, keeps us alive and attentive and connected and paying attention.
I generally enjoy the challenges of my work and life. I’m easily bored. I like to grow and acquire new skills. I like to test myself and see how many new things I can cram into my head.
As soon as I can easily clear one bar — (the high jump kind, not the alcoholic kind!) — I usually raise it by finding something new and tough to learn and potentially get better at. A life spent coasting, happily resting on one’s laurels, is just not very appealing to me.
(This might be something that runs in my family; my Dad turns 84 in a few weeks and plans to go sky-diving to celebrate.)
How about you?
Does struggle invigorate or annoy you?
NOTE: I leave today — computer-free! — for five days travel and into the Grand Canyon. So if your comments go unanswered until Friday, please don’t despair.
Jose may post a pre-written few things in my absence, or offer a guest blog of his own.
A man and a woman performing a modern dance. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The studio is huge — maybe 30 feet by 30 feet. One wall is mirror, one is glass, facing the parking lot. Two large fans create a cross-breeze. There is no clock.
The others are young, slim, lithe, their bodies able to do the most unlikely things with ease. There are three other women — a girl of maybe 15, one perhaps the same and one who might be in her 30s. There are two men, loose and easy in their skins, with the distinctive elegance of the dancer, both students at the University of Arizona.
Then there’s me.
I stand at the back, feeling lumpy and old in my black leggings and T-shirt, a bandana around my forehead to keep the sweat from dripping into my eyes. I’m wearing my black cotton jazz shoes, and have dropped into an advanced jazz class.
Madness!
Actually, it turns out just fine. The instructor is Taylor, a tall blond whose manner is comfortable and helpful, and we start out by warming up with stretches, the opposite of what we do in my Monday morning jazz class at home. Then on to push-ups and ab work. I keep waiting for us to start the center barre — the ballet routine we normally do (battements, ronds de jambes, tendues, plies, degages, etc.) — but we never do.
Instead, to my nervous delight, we are given a routine to memorize and perform, to an aching and melancholy song by Florence and the Machine. It doesn’t feel like jazz and it doesn’t feel like ballet. It feels more like modern dance, which I’ve never studied. But in I plunge, twisting and rolling and shaking my shoulders. Taylor uses the floor a lot, demanding rolls and twists and a sudden arching of our backs with our heads as pivot point.
No problem.
It is a new feeling, to simply enjoy my body for all the things it still can do, quickly, with precision, carving forms in the air on the beat. In the old days, for decades, I would hate it for all that it cannot do, for the too-big bum or not-high-enough arches or muscular forearms that resemble those of a 18th-century laundress.
Now, after years of agony and limping and crutches, I am just so thrilled to have a functioning body that can glide and leap and twist and pivot and stretch at will.
Dance is a language, a vocabulary of movement. What a delicious relief to shrug off the burden of verbal expression! Here I speak with a flick of my hands or a roll of my head or an extension of my leg, foot pointed or flexed flat.
It is such a rare joy to move with grace and speed and power, not merely using my body-as-tool in quotidian tasks, to climb stairs or drive a car or load a dishwasher.
The other students are lovely to watch, especially the younger girl who is quick, precise and has astonishing technique.
Then we’re given four pieces of music with which to improvise. I’ve never had that chance, and here among others of tremendous training and exquisite line. Their arabesques are gorgeous, mine not nearly so much.
I could freeze with fear, knowing how beautiful and skilled they all are. I’m the interloper, the one with the new(ish) replacement hip I’m still a little protective of.
But dance we do, each in our separate bubble, and it’s lovely to make it up in the instant of hearing a note or a phrase. My hands and feet and arms and legs — having studied ballet from the age of 12 — know what to do without thought. I don’t plan or think or fuss or wonder.
Like grass or corn in a breeze, I simply move.
Untethered by expectation, for once, I simply fly free.
We’re asked to use the room: walls, floor, ceiling, mirror. There’s not a lot to choose from! I crouch into the corner, bounce off a wall (that seems familiar!) and watch the others roll and slide. Then, finally, partnering, which I shy away from, truly feeling odd woman out.
The men are simply amazing to watch, never not touching, bending and twisting and crouching and lifting. Even the teacher is moved by their seamlessness.
The reason I’m in Tucson for the moment is that my husband helps teach a two-week workshop called The New York Times Student Journalism Institute, offered twice a year to Hispanic and African-American students and recent graduates. Participants win two weeks mentoring one-on-one, while reporting stories here, with Times staff. (The other program is offered in New Orleans.)
All expenses paid, plus a stipend.
Oh, and your work may end up in the Times. Pretty amazing opportunity!
English: The New York Times building in New York, NY across from the Port Authority. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I spoke to the students about how to freelance, several of whom had already begun to do it, and one lesson I shared is that you join a small community of people (even internationally) if you stay in the industry — one of the editors here was my city editor in 2006 at the New York Daily News — who I hadn’t seen since then.
I went hiking here with a woman I’d never met before, who moved to New York from the Seattle newspaper, and she is close friends with someone there I met on a fellowship in Maryland about 15 years ago.
Like that!
This is the hand-out I gave them:
ABC: Always be Closing. Successful full-time freelancers spend a great deal of their time – sometimes the majority of it – marketing their work and skills to potential clients, whether corporate, small business, non-profit, academic or journalism. You must be setting up or closing sales almost every day to insure a continuous and unbroken revenue stream. It’s a fact of life – no sooner do you have a great relationship established with a well-paid client than they move to a different position or company and you have start all over again. Or their budget is cut.
Remember the 80/20 rule – 80 percent of your business will probably come from 20 percent of your clients. Consider every first-time assignment a combination of audition and job interview. Knock their socks off! Meet your word count, deliver clean, accurate copy early and you’ll make a great impression. Unless (which happens) your client is a total PITA, you’ll want repeat business from them. So much easier than finding a new one, and another!
What are your monthly living costs? Now add 20 to 30 percent above that, at least, for short and long-term savings, your 15% payment to Social Security and your own retirement funds.
As a freelancer, you must know to the penny what you have, what you owe, who owes you what and when, the APRs on your credit cards and loans (and how to negotiate lower ones), and your FICO score. Payments often arrive later than you expect or need – how will you cover that shortfall?
Who will you be working for? There are many places to find freelance assignments: local, regional, national and international newspapers, magazines and websites and trade publications, in addition to corporate, small business, non-profit and academic clients. What rights are they demanding to your work? Can you re-sell it? How soon?
How will you find clients? Create a great website with clips, resume, your phone numbers, email address, Twitter handle. Use social media. Attend writers’ conferences like Neiman and ASJA to meet and start networking with other writers; referrals will become your best source of qualified leads. Update your LinkedIn profile regularly.
Do you have a specialty? It might be sports, science, environment, politics, culture, immigration, women’s issues, business, medicine, technology. It helps when pitching, but don’t feel you have to pigeonhole yourself either.
It’s all on you! The fun (and terror) of working freelance means you’re all on your own. No one sets your hours or schedule. It’s all up to you to find and manage every client, invoice, track payments, pay taxes, claim deductions, do your own training and development, and maybe find and hire and manage an assistant. Keep very close tally of all your income and expenses.
Ideas are everywhere – which markets are the best for each? The best stories have multiple angles making them saleable to a variety of editors: trade, consumer, websites. The same story could be a profile, business piece, trend story, regional item – or all of these.
Learn the lingo: FOB, LOI, WMFH, POP, etc.
The FOB, for example, is the front of the book – those small, short items that often make it easier to break into a big national magazine. An LOI is a letter of introduction, in which you reach out to a new editor and ask for work. WMFH is a work made for hire – they own all rights to it forever, and POP is pay on publication, not a great idea!
Four useful websites
Freelancefolder.com – general tips on the business of freelancing
therenegadewriter.com (and her book) – Linda Formichelli also offers regular motivational tips by email
Freelancesuccess.com — $99/year gains you access to online forums to talk with other writers and information about new markets
http://dollarsanddeadlines.blogspot.com (and her book) – Kelly James-Enger offers smart, helpful, practical tips like TEA: Thank, Explain, Ask when trying to bump up your fees. I tried it – it worked!
Asja.org – The American Society of Journalists and Authors. Their annual conference, held at the end of April in Manhattan, offers a reduced student admission. Great place to meet editors, agents and fellow writers.
Anything you’d like to know about what it’s like to freelance full-time for a living?
It was only after we saw this sign that we turned to one another — cool New York City journalists who are expected to know a lot about the world every day — that we asked each other: “What is it we’re supposed to do?”
We had started our hike through Sabino Canyon, on the edge of Tucson, before reading the warning signs. You do not run. You do not turn your back. You try to make yourself larger than before (eat a doughnut? Eat a dozen?) in order to scare it.
Yeah, right.
We did not, luckily, see a mountain lion.
English: This is a view of Sabino Canyon, northeast of Tucson, AZ, nestled in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We did see three white-tailed deer, a bunny (might have been a jackalope), doves and about five different sorts of lizard, one so tiny he was the width of my middle finger and would easily have fit into my palm. They would pause, virtually invisible against a small rock or a tree trunk, waving their frond of a tail back and forth. They were impossibly lovely, so perfectly designed for their environment. One was striped in rust, white and brown, reminding me of a chipmunk.
I love the desert. It is such an elemental place, filled with a beauty that is specific and subtle. Cactus have a cartoony presence when fleshy, green and alive — but their bones, as it were, are an astonishing interior architecture, when dried and brittle and gray, that looks like coral. Every student of art, design and architecture needs to spend hours, days, weeks, studying this landscape.
As we walked, flakes of mica winked up at us from the rocky path. I picked up three of them. If I found a really big one I could use it as a mirror and flash it at the sky for an SOS signal. (If I knew Morse code. Oooops.)
Aren’t they gorgeous?
We started our hike at 8:00 a.m., although the sun had been up since 6:00. I knew there are rattlesnakes and my friend asked me to make the sound they make but I am not very good at imitating it. I did know enough not to stick my hand beneath any rocks or to sit down without looking around very carefully.
One of the reasons I so love being out in the desert is the necessary reminder that, out there — as in our every urban day, deceptively cocooned by labels and technology and fast/fine food and taxis and buses and jobs — we are merely one more species on this fragile planet.
We are poorly adapted, too. Our skin is fragile, easily punctured or torn by the spines and thorns of the plants out there. We will quickly overheat and char if we do not drink a lot of water and wear a wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen.
It is a deeply powerful, humbling reminder how silly and small we are in the greater scheme of things. As we walked through the landscape, I realized how much I don’t know about the natural world. What’s the name of that tree? Why are those rocks darker than the others? How can trees grow so high and healthy in so arid a place? (Snow melt and monsoons, a guide told us later.)
So my amazing daughter, Emma, turned 5 last month, and I had been searching everywhere for new-creative inspiration for her 5yr pictures. I noticed quite a pattern of so many young girls dressing up as beautiful Disney Princesses, no matter where I looked 95% of the “ideas” were the “How to’s” of how to dress your little girl like a Disney Princess…
It started me thinking about all the REAL women for my daughter to know about and look up too, REAL women who without ever meeting Emma have changed her life for the better. My daughter wasn’t born into royalty, but she was born into a country where she can now vote, become a doctor, a pilot, an astronaut, or even President if she wants and that’s what REALLY matters. I wanted her to know the value of these amazing women who had gone against everything so she can now have everything. We chose 5 women (five amazing and strong women), as it was her 5th birthday but there are thousands of unbelievable women (and girls) who have beat the odds and fought (and still fight) for their equal rights all over the world……..so let’s set aside the Barbie Dolls and the Disney Princesses for just a moment, and let’s show our girls the REAL women they can be.
The black and white photos of Emma, dressed and posed as Amelia Earhart, Coco Chanel, Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller and Jane Goodall are charming, lovely and thought-provoking — taken by her mother, Austin, TX-based photographer Jaime Moore.
English: Helen Keller. Français : Helen Keller. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I don’t have a daughter or even nieces to hang out with, but smart, powerful, high-achieving role models are huge for young girls, especially in cultures that tend to value women primarily or exclusively for being thin/pretty/docile/mothers.
It’s not easy to be a smart, ferociously determined young woman, and find a welcoming place in a larger world that is sharp-elbowed enough as it is.
Molly Ivins (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Growing up, some of the women in my field of journalism who inspired me included contemporary photographers Susan Meiselas, Deborah Turbeville, and Jill Krementz (who I got to meet and shadow for a day, {also Kurt Vonnegut’s wife}) and other successful women journalists, from Molly Ivins and Nelly Bly and Margaret Bourke-White to war correspondents Marguerite Higgins and Martha Gellhorn, (also one of Hemingway’s wives).
As a young girl, Carol Guzy always wanted to be an artist. But as she was coming of age in a working-class family in Bethlehem, Pa., such an ambition seemed impossible. “Everyone I knew said, ‘Oh, if you’re an artist, you’ll starve,'” she recalls. “You have to do something really practical.'” So Guzy chose to go to nursing school. Halfway through she realized she would not, could not, be a nurse. “I was scared to death I was going to kill someone by making some stupid mistake,” she laughs. So while she was trying to figure out what to do with her life, a friend gave her a camera and she took a photography course. Her fascination with photography led to an internship and then a job at the Miami Herald. In 1988 she moved to The Post. Her photographs have won three Pulitzer Prizes and three Photographer of the Year awards in the National Press Photographers’ annual contest.
A long list of cool, brave women led the way so that I could do the work I enjoy. I admire the hell out of them and am grateful to them for speaking up and out and taking risks, both physical and professional.
Signature of Susan B Anthony (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
English: New York, New York. Newsroom of the New York Times newspaper. Reporters and rewrite men writing stories, and waiting to be sent out. Rewrite man in background gets the story on the phone from reporter outside. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Last week I went back to defend our title in the Asian American Journalists Association annual trivia contest, which The New York Times won last year, beating The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and others.
Each company can bring a team of ten, and the goal is to raise funds for scholarships and other AAJA programs. Being a trivia fiend who once qualified for Jeopardy, this is my kind of night!
It was held in a beautiful ballroom on Broad Street, at very southern end of Manhattan, a half a block from the New York Stock Exchange. It’s a part of the city I never visit, where all you can see are thin slices of sky barely visible above the narrow, steep canyon walls of skyscrapers. Guys with gelled hair in costly suits stride past, weary from a day of moving millions, or billions, of dollars.
It also reminded me, sadly, how terrifying 9/11 must have been down there as thousands of people ran as fast and far as they could from the huge dark cloud of dust and debris that chased them through those narrow streets.
The event brought out a combined team from CBS/ABC, from General Motors (the main sponsor) and others, including AARP, who were nothing if not consistent — dead-last in 8th. place the whole evening.
We were tied for fourth through the first four rounds, suddenly ascending after the fifth round to second place — but losing by (shriek) three points. But we had a blast, got to know some new people and are even more determined to re-claim the Tea Cup next year.
The raffle prizes must have been bid on by our table alone as we kept winning them. I scored a $450 three-month health club membership for my $20 worth of tickets. Cool!
So, my dears, here are some of the 60 questions lobbed at us.
No Googling!
Which actor has won the most Academy Awards?
What is the best-selling album of all time?
What is the longest-running scripted show on American television?
From which novel did the company Starbucks get its name?
How many oceans are there?
What is the capital of West Virginia?
Pluto was re-classified as a planet to….?
Which dinosaur turned out not to be real after all?
What is the name of the spacecraft that landed on the moon?
Which two lawyers argued the Scopes monkey trial?
Which designer currently heads the Fashion Designers Council of America?
What was the 48th. state?
What is the only even prime number?
What country lies directly north of Germany?
Who is the founder of Standard Oil?
Which President is the only one to have held a patent?
Which American athlete has won the most Winter Olympics medals?
Which fashion designer took over after the death of Alexander McQueen?
Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six
hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a
brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something
that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental
hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I’d
envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.
My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising,
lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews,
isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches
of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house
slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure
(playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right
fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the
composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices,
my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most
crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect
recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of
self-forgiveness, be “good enough”.
I find this an interesting, and extremely rare, admission of what it’s like to achieve and sustain public excellence.
English: A post-concert photo of the main hall’s stage inside of Carnegie Hall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We see and hear, and applaud, (or boo or yawn at), the final product of many talented hard-working people, but often have absolutely no idea what it took to get them there — onto the concert stage, into the corps de ballet, onto the bookstore shelf or into the kitchen of a fine restaurant.
I’m fascinated by process, always hungry to hear how others are doing it and what, if anything, they have had to give up along the way. By the time we see someone becoming famous and, possibly, well-paid for their talents, we’re really looking at an iceberg — seeing barely 10 percent of their story, the other 90 percent often being years, even decades, of study and practice and rejection and failure that led up to this moment.
The Passage of Time (Photo credit: ToniVC)
I think it’s worth reading these stories as a way of thinking about our own choices:
How much longer will I devote to this project?
What I never achieve my goal?
Are there smaller, more private, less lucrative successes that would also satisfy me?
If not, why not?
What am I willing to give up?
How much will I regret those losses?
I weary of the widespread fantasy that “everyone’s a writer.” They’re not!
Recent research and a popular book have theorized that it takes 10,000 hours for a human to become proficient and considered an expert at something. It seems so easy: Put in the Time, Collect the Dime. I think most adults can see some truth in this theory based on their own experiences. Driving a car is a great example. While we are learning, we are cognizant of every movement, every decision, every possibility. After time, we become very natural at it. It almost becomes a reflexive action. (For example, when’s the last time you thought about—really concentrated on—operating the turn signal?)
What makes it interesting is that it could apply to anything, from knitting to playing the violin. The implications for an art form are obvious and the research pointers are fairly sound. However my question is: Is it enough to make good art?
It is even harder, depending on a wide variety of external circumstances — do you have kids? A big mortgage? Student debt? Poor health? — to make a lot of money doing something purely creative, versus working for The Man and taking home a steady paycheck.
At Ngong Racecourse in Nairobi, Kenya, the only track in a 3,300-mile swath of Africa between Egypt and Zimbabwe, the jockeys struggle to earn $20 a ride, even in the big races. For the country’s biggest race, the Kenya Derby, the winning horse’s owner may take home little more than $7,200. Grooms, who wake up at 4:30 six mornings a week to muck out stables and brush down horses, make less than $100 a month. Yet, the dwindling numbers of trainers, jockeys, owners and breeders in Kenya are deeply committed to keeping the sport alive.
I started working for Canada’s best newspaper, The Globe and Mail, at 26, after applying for a staff job every year for eight years. I eventually wanted to come to New York and so, after a day’s work, also worked as a stringer (contacts I sought out) for Time, The Boston Globe and the Miami Herald. I needed to find American editors who liked my work and to up my game.
Knowing I planned to leave Toronto within a few years also meant not settling down and getting married and having kids, (not a dream of mine anyway.) I moved to New Hampshire in 1988, leaving family, friends, career and country, then moved to New York just in time for a horrible recession, with no job. I got one after six months, earning $5,000 less in March 1990 than I’d made in Montreal in September 1986 — in a much costlier place to live.
Every move we make is a choice that carries consequences and every one carries a cost — physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, professional. Sometimes all of those at once!
That’s why they’re called sacrifices, and why it’s so much nicer to just avoid them. And the worst fear, perhaps, is that you make a ton of them and still don’t get what it was you really wanted.
So it helps to figure out what you really want — the fancy job title and shiny new car or a life with enough room in it to travel three months every year? A bunch of kids or the creative freedom to fail at new ideas and still pay your monthly bills? A loving spouse or the sort of work that moves you from one conflict spot to the next, in an NGO or aid work or journalism? (They are not all either/or, but they will enact sacrifices.)
No matter who you are or where you live or what you hope to achieve in life — non-materially — the fewer your financial obligations, the easier it is to focus on that.
Do you have a specific dream you’re trying to achieve?
What are you willing to do — to give up — to get there?
The New Republic, in this piece, argues in favor of being more social:
Teach a lonely person to respond to others without fear and
paranoia, and over time, her body will make fewer stress hormones and
get less sick from them. Care for a pet or start believing in a
supernatural being and your score on the UCLA Loneliness
Scale will go down. Even an act as simple as joining an athletic team or
a church can lead to what Cole calls “molecular remodeling.” “One
message I take away from this is, ‘Hey, it’s not just early life that
counts,’ ” he says. “We have to choose our life well.”
The story is long and complicated, and its underlying premise argues for more government funding for parents and young children.
But the larger point is an interesting one in a time when we are so connected by technology — thousands of you have signed up to follow me but will never meet me in person — yet often so lacking in true emotional and intellectual intimacy.
It took me a long, long time to make new friends when I came to New York. I was 30, and had always had very close friends and had made new friends easily. It was puzzling and miserable that I couldn’t seem to replicate that here.
But New York is a place where many people come with the absolute goal of making a lot of money and getting ahead and becoming powerful and famous — which all leaves little time to hang out for a few hours over coffee. New Yorkers also suffer the longest commute to work of anyone in the U.S., so even if someone likes you, they’re often sprinting for the 5:14 or the 8:22 back home to their own family.
I found the place annoyingly tribal; if you hadn’t attended the same schools as others, preferably an Ivy League college, you were simply persona non grata. College and graduate school as a sorting mechanism are powerful tools here.
I was lonely for a long time. In the past three or four years, finally, I’m happily starting to enjoy an active social life again, recently fielding two invitations to visit one friend in Pennsylvania and another at her house upstate. Last night, I met one friend, in from San Francisco, for a drink and another for dinner.
(Oddly, or not, they knew one another, having worked together decades ago for the same NYC book publisher and both [!] arrived with copies of their publishers’ new books for me to read. In addition to the three I had just bought {thanks, Danielle!}, I was now coming home carrying nine books!)
It feels really good to have friends you know for sure love you and are rooting for you. We need to be liked and valued, so see someone’s face light up with pleasure when they see us and lean in for a ferocious hug.
But building friendship also requires intimacy and intimacy takes time and effort, two things many of us have difficulty mustering up after a day of hard work (or looking for work) and commuting and caring for our families and pets and ourselves. Intimacy requires trust and being vulnerable and opening yourself up to someone new.
I paid a very high price for being lonely in 1998 when I became the victim of a con man. I was isolated, struggling financially, had not had a boyfriend in two years, was divorced and feeling as low and insecure as I ever have. The vulture swooped in — I was emotional roadkill.
After I survived that ordeal, I immediately joined a small, friendly local church. Living alone in the suburbs, without kids or any emotional connection to others living near me, I desperately needed community. I needed, and found, a place where I could feel safe again, and valued, and heal.
The French say it so much better, as usual — subway/train, work, sleep. (Enough already!)
That’s what “normal” life too often devolves into, a steady and numbing routine that continues unbroken, sometimes for decades.
The past 10 days’ break have been a blessing indeed, with a deliciously indolent rhythm of eat/sleep/repeat. Shop, visit a museum, see friends, read for pleasure, sit in the sun on the dock and listen to gulls squawking. Just slooooooooooooow down to whatever pace is ours alone.
Both of the friends we stayed with, both long-married couples with empty nests, are people we’ve known for many years, welcoming and gracious hosts who fed us well and stayed up into the night talking. Both have cats and large, affectionate dogs who would come and nose us awake in the silent mornings.
The husbands get along beautifully and the women, like me, love to make stuff, whether sewing or art or calligraphy — one is a fellow writer and the other is a graphic designer who teaches and runs her own firm. She helped me make this amazing bag with fabric I bought years ago in Toronto and a vintage watch face I found in Richmond and attached with a button — with a $ sign! — she just happened to have in her stash of antique buttons.
It’s the perfect bag for a freelance writer: time, words, money.
It was deeply refreshing to just not have to do anything. (That’s not entirely accurate, as two of my editors wanted more work on two stories I thought were fully tied off, but you ignore clients at your peril.)
This week back home in New York is a bit of the usual whirlwind — meeting a friend in from San Francisco Tuesday for a drink, an event at a local library for my book “Malled” on Wednesday, and Thursday night will join a group of New York Times staffers at a trivia contest — we won last year, so it’s time to defend our title against The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and a room filled with ferocious journalism competitors eager to prove who’s smartest.
It will be the usual blur of meetings, calls, emails, pitches, errands, follow-ups.
The silhouette of a large saguaro stands at sunset in Saguaro National Park on the east side of Tucson, Arizona. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
But next Saturday we fly to Tucson, Arizona for two more weeks where Jose will be working long days teaching the New York Times Student Journalism Institute. I’ll be giving a lecture on freelancing, but the rest of my time there is pure rest and relaxation. I’m hoping to hike the Grand Canyon again — the last time was June 1994 — alone, as last time. I can’t wait to go horseback riding through one of my favorite parts of the country.
Our time off has let us feel human again, not just weary industrial cogs in machines moving far too quickly. We laughed a lot and slept deeply.
Broadside 