Real Joe

DL writes:

“… tonight I was at church rehearsing with a trumpet quartet. I’m an average player, but the guys I play with are excellent. I also play a pretty decent piano, but of course I know many who are better – there is my inner critic working – it’s always been there throughout my life – no matter how good I’ve gotten at something. (I’m much better at recognizing it now).

I can pretty much handle these – but then I see one of the guy’s kids – a 2nd grader – playing the piano very well and a very bright kid. My son, in his 3rd year of piano, can’t play anywhere close. Where my mistaken thinking comes in is comparing my son to his son and to his life in general (you know – lawyer, talented, family seems perfect, etc……). But mostly to what I perceive as limitations of my kids. Griff – did you ever deal with that when your kids were young? I hope so much for them – but they are who they are and they have their limitations. Again, my inner critic comes in saying what could I do as a parent to make their lives better – or what haven’t I done?”

There’s a point at which my natural parental pride in my kids goes too far and becomes an ego thing. And that’s when there’s a mistaken idea lingering somewhere, that somehow, I’m deficient, and therefore my kids need to make up for it.

I remember this most clearly when my oldest son Collin tore his ACL on my trials motorcycle at age 13, just as he was starting to show some real talent in the sport. He never rode again. I’d often get little “ego orgasm” pangs of envy when my good buddy Jim would show up at events with his two sons. At some point, I let it go. He got into canoe racing and though I didn’t join him in that because of my sciatica, we stayed connected through his teen years till he left home.

In retrospect, I think the key was finding ways to be with one another in which we both ended up enjoying one another. Camping, bicycling, frisbee, board/card games, computers. The pure enjoyment of his company ended up being stronger than my desire to have an ego orgasm over his performance at something important to me.

It helped to know that my own father desperately wanted me to become a model Catholic, that he couldn’t enjoy being with me in my adulthood, that it not only got in our way of enjoying each other, but also prevented him from having any kind of decent relationship with his grandkids. I could understand how he got to that place, but I really wanted to avoid a similar fate.

My response [expired link] to a dad who’s struggling with his mistaken thinking about his son’s performance.

Real Live Preacher is working on a book, based in part on stuff he’s posted to his weblog. Which means he’s got a new hat to wear that’s he’s not entirely comfortable with:

Here, at the end of a long year of writing, I can actually say the words I’ve never been able to say before, though I still want to run and hide when I say them. I am a writer.

I think I’ll follow his blog more closely, as I’m struggling with the same task — getting my Small Business Blogging book done.

Kent Nerburn is using the January dagger and lack of social contact to get his book done.

On the my Ego Orgasm blog [defunct], I posted this definition last November:

An ego orgasm is whatever I do or happens in life that I think gives me a psychological boost but that turns out to be false. Mistaken. Often times destructive. And once it’s over, unless I see the mistaken thinking behind it, the hunger for another one quickly returns.

Here’s Eckhart Tolle’s definition of ego in his book, The Power of Now:

As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phanton self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through continuous thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind.

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it — who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: “One day, when this, that or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace.” – Eckhart Tolle

The “seek some kind of release or fulfillment” in the future that he describes is the orgasm that seems to be tripping me up most of the time. Current example: “When my knee heals and I return to racquetball and trials, THEN I’ll really be…” What? Somebody! Oy. Whoever that ’somebody’ is must be rooted in my past, and I’m trying to keep it alive with this mistaken thinking about the future.

As part of my day job, I was just invited to attend an upcoming conference in Mpls titled Trend Agenda. One of the organizers is Cecily Sommers, Principal Strategist, UNIT 1. When I went to her company’s website, I found this essay in her weblog: Between Mook and Metrosexual, it’s a No-Man’s Land: Will the Real Man please stand up! She’s citing some of the same cultural shifts that Susan Faludi wrote about in the book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man only she’s more current… and Faludi’s book came out before the so called backlash kicked in, epitomized by The Man Show. I didn’t know the term “mook” – maybe because I’m only up to season 2 on Sopranos DVDs. I also wasn’t aware of the term “manity,” coined by Faith Popcorn in her 2003 trends report. (Why is it that it’s women who are chronicling the male cultural shifts?)

Sommers’ piece is a good read. She’s not bemoaning the trends, just noting them. While the dichotomy isn’t as extreme in real life as its protrayed in the media, it’s evident in my life. My good buddy Jim just hosted an open house for his new monster garage/workshop, calling it the Southern Minnesota Men’s Crisis Center (photo gallery).

We sat around and drank beer and watched Jackass and talked motorcycles and had a grand time being mooks. But the fact that there are photos of women there (wives and daughters infiltrated towards the end of the night – maybe even earlier) betrays us. We’re family guys, involved in our communities, trying to stay in shape, and — more than we care to admit — trying to be a little more fashion conscious for our sweeties. (Trim that nose hair! Don’t wear the same ten year-old shirt 4 days in a row!) So we’re influenced by the culture, no doubt, but I think there’s probably more than a few us who are moderating its extremes.

Here’s a snip from the essay:

True masculinity is no longer a simple question of to quiche or not to quiche. No, the measure of today’s man swings between whether he watches “The Man Show” or gets a manicure. Whether he hangs out at “Hooters” or is a culinary master, sports a beer gut (a “1-pack”) or a finely chiseled abdominal 6-pack, drives a “Beemer” or a pick-up with fuzzy dice.

Now there’s nothing new about how groups of people generate their own culture with distinct signifiers of belonging. But there’s something going on here that’s more than just a matter of demographic differences; the sheer volume of the two trends in popular culture, as well as their polarity invite a deeper look.

Trend-watchers are paying attention to this emerging dichotomy in male identity. On the one hand we have what trend guru Faith Popcorn calls “Manity,” a marked increase in straight men who’ve grown a taste for facials and interior design. The facts speak for themselves: according to the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the number of plastic surgery procedures on men in the U.S. has increased threefold since 1997. Clearly at home in the pursuit of aesthetic improvement, this fashion-conscious man of the new millennium has been dubbed the “Metrosexual.”

In what looks like a backlash to the feminized Metrosexual is a portrait of a man on the opposite end of the spectrum. Here, in defense of the more traditional male rites of boozing and belching is — in the words of Tony Soprano – the “Mook.” This testosterone-driven lug is becoming all the rage, to which the phenomenal success of television programs such as Jackass, Girls Gone Wild! and The Man Show gives credible testament.

There’s a natural tension between opposites. The fact that the Mook and Metrosexual have such a heightened presence right now suggest that they are an expression of a deeper tension in the contemporary male psyche. It’s an identity in search of self, and as tension generally heralds change, it’s also an indicator of a deeper cultural shift that’s underway. As ever, popular culture will be both the instrument and the witness to this struggle and its effects.

As I was struggling to do a complete 555 routine yesterday, I noticed that many of thoughts that came galloping into my head were of the “shit I haven’t done but should do” variety.

I then remembered this paragraph from Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now:

The psychological condition of fear is divorced form any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.

And then I remembered that I bought this book about a year ago but never read it: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (website here). Here’s a snip from his Chapter 1 (the full text is available on Barnes and Noble):

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pinpointed. Most people have been in some version of this mental stress state so consistently, for so long, that they don’t even know they’re in it. Like gravity, it’s ever-present-so much so that those who experience it usually aren’t even aware of the pressure. The only time most of them will realize how much tension they’ve been under is when they get rid of it and notice how different they feel.

So now that I’m aware of how often I’m entertaining anxiety about the undone, I’m more motivated to read Allen’s book and get it resolved. Or it could end up being just another “should” on my shitlist. We’ll see. I just searched this Real Joe weblog and discovered that I first wrote about Allen’s book back on May 17, 2002. And then, omigod, again exactly one year ago. I guess that’s a sign.

I’ve not gotten to writing up Part II of my transcript (see Part I) but I don’t seem to be making much headway in the past week. My busy, noisy mind just keeps working overtime. And while I thought I was on top of the negative noise, I was surprised to find myself in a bit of a funk yesterday, triggered by my struggles with my new laptop and switching all the apps and files. I eventually caught myself and spent 20 minutes getting my head resituated. And it may have served a purpose to not get so cocky about how easy this shit is.

I heard from CJ: “In a curious coincidence, at the urging of another friend, I bought the CDs of Tolle’s Practice of the Power of Now and listened to them while driving from airports to gigs in California and Texas over the last month. I do find myself intrigued. He captures, even through his obtuse rhetoric, my situation. The minds works all the time, overtime, overtaking and overruling other sources of direction and energy. So, it is fascinating to think of getting outside the mind and thinking of it as something that might be observed, rather than consistently serve. You can characterize me as your workaholic, Type A, ENTJ (Myers Briggs) colleague who thinks entirely too much, and sometimes not too well. The trick for me is to get that non-thinking second to expand into a minute or so. That’ll be big.”

This week I’m going to redeploy the 555 technique as a way to reign in the noisy head, while continuing to WWMNTIGTB – wonder what my next thought is going to be. And I’m going to explore “echoing” described in this article How to Echo Talk by Shinzen Young. “Without a doubt the biggest challenge facing most people in the early years of their practice is dealing with obsessive internal chatter, also known as monkey mind. Among the coping strategies commonly adopted are attempting to sooth the chatter through a mantra (as in T.M.) or carefully observing it (as in standard Vipassana). The echoing process combines the strengths of both these methods in a clever way. (My motto is, “If you can’t be disciplined, be clever!”)

And a tip of the Real Joe hat to Norm who corrected me on two items: one fills a humidifier, not a dehumidifier; and the actor in The Last Samurai was Tom Cruise, not Brad Pitt. I told my wife that I probably wouldn’t make a similar mistake with, say, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts.

My physical therapist told me I could mess around on the racquetball court by myself, as long as I didn’t swing hard, torqueing my knee.

But as my knee started to feel better and get stronger, I kept doing more and more hard swinging. Last week, it occurred to me that I couldn’t stop myself from doing this so I cut up the strings on my racquet. Not unlike an alcholic who takes antabuse.

Jeesh, you’d think I’d have more self-control than this but apparently not. And of course, just because I don’t have use of my own racquet now, doesn’t mean I can’t borrow one. Oy.

I have dinner with my sibs tonight… older sister and younger brother. For the past two years or so, we’ve been getting together for a long dinner 3-4 times per year, just to talk and be with one another. We grew up pretty emotionally distant from one another and, having recognized this, are trying to do something about it as we’ve also recognized that we’d like to be closer.

I told my daughter this morning that I’m always tense before these dinners and she asked me why with a hint of incredulity in her voice. She just had a birthday dinner with her brothers and is always thrilled to be with them.

I think I’m overly cautious when I meet with them, now that I think about it. My relationship with them is so tenuous, I guess I try to stay safe… and maybe that’s getting in the way. So tonight, I’m planning on being more open, less fearful. Take more risks. And to not concern myself with any outcome. To paraphrase Larry Brilliant, “I’m entitled to the joy of dinner with my sibs, I’m just not entitled to the results.”

I’d also like to see if I can keep my “silent watcher” engaged, so that the stuff I say to them isn’t totally fueled by my fears and desires.

Be present as the watcher of your mind — of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don’t judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don’t make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher. — Eckhart Tolle

My buddy Curt steered me to a new book called The Progress Paradox : How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse whose author, Gregg Easterbrook, was recently on MPR’s Midmorning. He also has a weblog on the New Republic site called EasterBlog.

He was on the PBS show ThinkTank last year and that link has a transcript of his interview. Here’s a quote:

Ben Wattenberg: So ten thousand per year, per capita income would mean a husband and wife, two children is a income of forty thousand dollars a year.

Gregg Easterbrook: Yeah. That’s the point at which additional income in research decouples from happiness and getting more money has nothing to do with how happy you feel in life. In a sense this is the proof that money cannot buy happiness. But researchers who have studied people, higher income people are no happier than lower income people. Members of the Forbes Four Hundred, the list of the richest men and women in the world, are not any happier as a group than people who earn the median income. Money doesn’t buy happiness. The proof is now in. If anybody doubted it, that’s true.

I think the modern era creates a materialism jealousy effect that didn’t exist before that you might call catalog induced anxiety. In previous centuries there’ve always been people of spectacular wealth and most people knew that they existed but they didn’t know the details of the lives of the Rockefellers or the Astors. All they knew was that they had lives that people could only dream of. Now we see every possible detail of the life of rich people, uh, on television, in Vanity Fair, in People magazine. The way the rich live is covered in extraordinary detail. And I think it makes people feel, even people who are themselves relatively well off, not wealthy but live in a nice house, don’t worry about where their next meal will come from, because they see the details of the lives of wealthy and the celebrities, it makes them feel that they themselves haven’t gotten what they wanted.

A telling statistic on this is that if you—no matter how much an American earns, he or she tells pollsters that twice as much is required to live well. So a person who earns twenty-five thousand dollars says you gotta have fifty thousand. A person who earns fifty says you gotta have a hundred. A person who earns a hundred says you gotta have two hundred. We’re programmed to think that we can’t live well unless we get much more. You can find individuals who have realized that money doesn’t buy happiness and that endlessly chasing the last dollar of maximized income is a formula for unhappiness. But as a society as a whole I don’t think we’ve realized this yet.

I think you might call this the revenge of the credit card. Your American Express card absolutely cannot buy you happiness. It can buy you unhappiness. If you use it too much, get into debt, you have debt problems, you have to work around the clock to pay your bills, the credit card will buy you unhappiness very reliably. But it can’t buy you happiness.