A Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis

When I was 20 years old an article appeared in my dad's New Yorker magazine called "The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis.” The article comes crashing into my head this morning, unbidden and too relevant, with startling detail; I’m able to locate it with a quick online search and devour it as quickly as I did as a younger man. It is the harrowing account of a prominent structural engineer who has a minor detail brought to his attention a year after the completion of a 915-foot skyscraper, NYC’s Citigroup Center: the entire building could collapse. Not just that it could collapse in a major windstorm. As the engineer investigated and ran his own calculations, corroborated by the best wind-testing center in the world, he learned that the chances were 1 in 16 in any given year. The fault lay in his design. And his mistake surfaced at the onset of hurricane season.

The story captivated me; even now, re-reading it, I can feel my pulse quicken as I follow along as emergency meetings are held, plans outlined, and the building reinforced—becoming "one of the strongest structures in the world" with the fix—all at the behest of a man who blows the whistle on himself at enormous risk to his reputation, career, and life. (At a pivotal moment when he had confirmed the statistical risk of collapse but hadn’t yet shared this with anyone, the engineer briefly considered sucicide, before dismissing it as "as a coward’s way out and…unconvincingly melodramatic.")

As I mentioned relevance to my own life at the outset, it must be stated that I’m not suicidal. I am, however, given to melodrama, which is probably why the situation I’m about to describe, and my quandary over what to do about it, is a 59-story edifice in my head alone. Yet there it is nonetheless: a building at risk of collapse, heading into hurricane season.

In May of this year I entered the race for our local school board. A few intense weeks later I withdrew. The breaking point came when Google suspended my newly-minted election account for sending out more than 1000 emails in a day, more accurately in 31 minutes. The roots of that dismantling, however, had been present in the blueprint of my campaign. I had considered a run  a full year before out of a passionate belief in greater accountability, transparency and communication between the board and the community, after a paraeducator strike shuttered schools (putting my kids home) for a week. Yet all that had been pushed to the back burner with situations requiring attention within my own family. And it was my own family, as ludicrous as it sounds even to me as I write these words now, that I failed to consult with before entering.

For a few weeks I enjoyed both respite and clarity. I had stepped down. Life had other plans, though: County rules forbid removal of one’s name from the election process. This is true at every step of the way. Including when one finishes a strong second out of four in an August primary, as I did, and advances to November.

The time since has been one of turmoil and indecision. On the one hand, I told myself what others were telling me: in essence, that a goodly number of folks hoped I would win and step up, the “if not me/who, if not now/when” argument. With everything happening in our country and world that has potentially devastating effects on our kids and schools, who am I, to not be the tower standing strong in the winds of change?

And on the other hand: more family stuff. Some of it entirely outside of my control, yet still impacting emotions, time, sleep, even work. In addition to being a father and a husband I’m also a son and a brother, and if I’m not attending to those roles…who am I? And how much do I let situations that will likely improve in the near-term (months) weigh on the decision of whether to serve a more longitudinal role (4 years)--or, wait right there, is not that service (4 years) the short-term role, which may be postponed a year or several if needed, compared to the lifelong role of family commitments?

What is the right thing to do? Can I serve, now, and still be a dad, sibling, human that I’m proud of?  And if I don’t win, can I set out to do the things I tell myself that I’d like to? Because is not part of being a good family member also participating in the larger “family” of community engagement? And herein, an opportunity (the school system) with immediate repercussions for my own family?

These questions continued to weigh on me. I went so far as to draft several versions of a Letter to the Editor asking people to not vote for me, before ultimately posting a letter on social media to the opposite effect...before realizing, no matter what I did, I couldn’t control the outcome. Nor, perhaps, should I be able to. 

I am neither a fifty-nine story building about to collapse, nor am I the grand edifice that will bring about universal enlightenment...or even, guarantee-ably, a better education for our district’s kids. I’m a human, I’ve made mistakes, and I’ll make more.

Which is not a reason that I should give up the questions, or stop trying to do the best I can.

At one point over the summer I discussed all of this with my life coach (yes, for the time being I have a life coach; no, it’s not covered by my insurance; and yes, I’d still recommend it, highly). I told him “A part of me is fed up with this culture of ‘me,’ where the ultimate arbiter of the right thing to do comes to its impact on the individual, rather than asking what is good for society, even if it’s not convenient for me right now.” In that sense, perhaps I am getting what I asked for. This really isn’t up to me. It’s up to you all.

And to address the larger question, can I be a human that I’m proud of, can I be the best I can be–that will not hinge on a single moment that is at once hugely outside of my control (whether I’m elected) and still, after that event, in my control (whether I serve). To go back to the fifty-nine-story crisis: the engineer’s decision to go public was not the end of the story. It was the beginning. He still had to call up and navigate innumerable meetings. To endure additional rounds (with every new group of persons who of necessity were looped in) of “why wasn’t this accounted for in the first place?” To identify and collaborate on solutions, cost, liability, actually strengthening the joints that would hold the building up in a storm. Similarly, whether or not I’m elected and serve, I will have a series of decision points and actions to take in the months and years ahead: To what will I devote my time and energy?

I’ll bring in a final metaphor, perhaps simply to soothe myself, which is the idea that I need be neither building nor builder. To quote my wife's beloved Paulo Cuelo, “A builder, no matter how long he might work at a building, finally completes it and it is done. A gardener, on the other hand, never completes his work, for always the plants are growing and changing, always there are seeds to be planted.” Perhaps, instead of a builder or building, I can be a gardener. Or a seed.

The Pause

The Pause

I am on the river and it is not raining. This is noteworthy not so much for the lack of rain–very normal for July on the lower Salmon River, which gathers courage and volume from the Sawtooth, Bitterroot and Lemhi Mountains before wending its way through a high desert canyon to join its former tributary, the now-larger Snake–as for the fact that it was several hours of rain, solid rain, that delayed the start of our trip yesterday. Today it is not raining and I am teaching my brother-in-law to row. In so doing I discover the pause.

I am on the river, and it is not raining. There is just enough itinerant cloud cover (are we rowing through it? or is it reaching out to us as it flies overhead to parts unknown?) to make the day not blazingly hot, and yet, as we are in Western Idaho instead of home on the Northern Olympic Peninsula in Washington, neither is it chilly, despite the morning hour. It is perfect.

Back, flip, dip, pause, pull, lift, roll, back, flip, dip, pause, pull, lift, roll, back, flip, dip, pause. 

Never before had I broken it down so completely. After the pull on the oars, with the blades perpendicular to the water, lift them out of the water. Before bringing them back for the next stroke, roll the wrists. Now the blades are parallel to the plane of the river’s surface, and will slice through a wave, if needed, to get back to the starting point for the next stroke. This “back” motion, achieved by pushing forward on the oar handles, can even be done entirely underwater. Now, flip back to perpendicular and dip for the next stroke.

And…breathe. Pause. Before that next stroke. Is the oarblade perpendicular to the water? Is there current there? Or eddy, or slackwater? Is your other oarblade perpendicular? Do you want to in fact push instead of pull on one or both oars? Where is the current taking you, and is your boat oriented how you’d like it? Where is the next biggest wave, rock, or hole to avoid?

Or are there no dangers present, and you can just...pause?

I am on the river, it is not raining, and after yesterday’s morning rain (punctuated by a horizontal squall precisely at dinner time, for which we employed the tarp we’d driven from the put-in site back to Grangeville to purchase) the air is delightful and I can imagine that the brown-and-sagebrush-grey canyon walls are just a little greener and I am not at work and I am with people I love and trust and I can pause.

Later, I will need to row. Through Half-N-Half and Snowhole and China and Skeleton Creek, and down 20 miles of the Snake after the confluence. To catch eddies for campsites and lunchsites, to avoid eddies and follow Ariadne’s thread of current through a labyrinth of slackwater, holes and rocks. So, too, my companions: my brother and his wife, my mom, and my brother-in-law, who is picking up the feel of rowing with alacrity and vim. For now, though, we are allowed a pause.

In pausing I can calibrate my oars. Where is the larger current of my life taking me? Am I oriented in such a way as to be able to pull back from giant waves, or square up to them when necessary? Do I need to eddy out and secure the frame, or scout the next rapid?

Am I even in the right river canyon?

Everything about our lives–let me pause right there. Everything about my life has been forward momentum; in looking around me, I think this is true for a great many of us. 

Certainly, the current power structure, the status quo, gains nothing from having me pause, think, question, be goofy. As long as I produce widgets and algorithms and patient encounters (I've never been good at treating patient encounters like widgets; my apologies to my patients for always running behind)...and then soothe my frazzled nerves by consuming property and widgets and algorithm-generated entertainment...the great machine rolls on, and I am but flotsam. I am not rowing, and if I am, it is but to accelerate my blind journey down an unquestioned torrent.

And so here I am. Pausing. In writing I have always found a pause; often, I end up at a place entirely different than what I expected when beginning the exposition. To return to my earlier and unexpected metaphor, I am, like Theseus, lucky, in love and in life. In my friends and family, and most of all, in my wife (who is planning to come with our boys on the trip next summer, and who was so wise to let us work out all the kinks without her this summer), I have my Ariadne’s thread. 

In pausing, I can pick up that thread, again and again, and row, and pause, not blindly. With intention.

A word after a word after a word

I was driving to the hospital when these words from Margaret Atwood flowed out of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio:

"A word

after a word

after a word

is power."

Three words.

Subject, verb, object. Or something else. 

Trees catch fire. The Earth warms. Winter arrived timidly. Birds fly home. Babies need food. 

Why this moment? Against all odds. Hope never dies. Will you help? What's your name? Can we try?

If not now...everything everywhere all at once. Simultaneously. Are there limits?

I love you.

Three words can change a mood, change a mind, change a motion. A different emotion can catch fire. Light a candle. Inspire another to change of heart, of action, of word.

I love you.

To quote another favorite author, Ursula K. Le Guin: "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky."

Against now five years of silence, I write a word, after a word, after a word. In hope. To try and help. Myself and maybe others. By committing, on paper, or out loud, or in pixels, as it were. To myself, to my sons, to my wife, to my parents and siblings and friends, to my patients, to my community, to the world:

I love you.

And from Edward R. Murrow: Good night, and good luck.

ACEs in the Era of Inequality and AGEs

link to full text article will open in a separate window:

ACEs in the Era of Inequality and AGEs

To reduce adverse childhood experiences and build healthy communities, we must address inequality in the context of adverse global experiences

Abstract

Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, affect a diversity of health outcomes from substance use to cardiovascular disease. We now understand some of the biologic pathways that translate this trauma into poor health, and exciting work to link this research with community improvement efforts forms the NEAR sciences: Neuroscience, Epigenetics, ACEs, and Resilience. A separate and substantial body of research has found wealth inequality to strongly and adversely affect a comparably wide range of health outcomes, including child well-being; it could be argued that inequality is upstream of ACEs. Finally, overwhelming evidence spanning the breadth of scientific inquiry shows how human activity threatens planetary health in what might be called “adverse global experiences,” or AGEs. We have a unique opportunity to make explicit the links between individual and global health. To improve the health of all we must address ACEs and AGEs and everything in between. Such a monumental task will only be achieved when we succeed in an even larger one—a sea change in our collective vision. Herein lies hope. That sea change may be so intrinsically appealing that its adoption may surprise us with its speed.

Introduction

“The health of the individual cannot be separated from the health of the family, the community and the world.” 
—the real Dr. Hunter Patch Adams

10 years into my medical career I took a 2-day training on the NEAR sciences: Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and Resilience. I’ve since shared this with audiences from physicians to teachers to parents struggling with their own ACEs. There is now tremendous hope around reducing ACEs and mitigating their effects through resilience research and interventions. Yet the data shows that childhood adversity is increasing.[1] Correspondingly, US mortality, already worse than in 35 other nations, has increased for 3 consecutive years, unprecedented in modern history.[2] Why is this happening?

The answer is complex. It carries us beyond the scope, as large a scope as it is...

keep reading: ACEs in the Era of Inequality and AGEs

(link will open in a separate window)

.  .  .  .  .

Posting #100

Okay so this is going to be my second blog in a month after not writing for over a year. As may have been obvious from the entry I just posted, I didn’t really know where I was going with it. That’s not unusual in and of itself. Often I’m not sure where an idea will take me. Mathematical concepts are an easy fallback and I found myself thinking about the idea of 6 degrees of separation, which is where the whole calculation about how much time it could potentially take to collect and share ideas from 7 billion people came from. Anyway you slice it, though, there wasn’t much said in that essay.

I just put the boys to bed after watching the 1953 version of Peter Pan with them. There was a fair amount of general sadness afterwards, nothing to do with Pan but rather with Mama not being present for bedtime. This was the first week back to school for both boys, so understandable there would be a little bit of angst.

Because of said angst, I delivered on my promise to tell an extra bedtime story after lights out. I asked if they wanted a giraffe story. Starting a couple of years ago I developed a whole Serengeti world replete with a four-member Giraffe family, Old Elephant and Baby Kale, Young Lion, Wise Baboon, Mama Hippo and Baby Amanzi (which means water in Zulu), and several others. I was tired and a giraffe story, like a blog about math, would have been an easy fallback. But Felix didn’t want a giraffe story. He wanted a story from when I was little boy.

Felix asked, wasn’t there a story about a mean teacher you had? I had to think about that and was drawing a blank, fortunately most of my grade school teachers were pretty kind, until he reminded me that I’d told them about a time when I was so afraid of our computer lab teacher in early grade school that I’d wet my pants rather than ask to use the bathroom. I can still remember that. I can still remember the surprise I felt at how much pee there was, still remember pretending to feel sick and going down to the principal’s office and asking for my mom and her coming to get me, and I can still remember my principle, Mr. Koopman, giving me the benefit of the doubt and commenting on how rainy and wet it was outside, that was obviously how I’d gotten so wet. Mr. Koopman was kind. That can make all the difference.

I didn’t, however, revisit that story, beyond acknowledging it. Instead I told them about third grade, when I really wanted to be an author, and the stories I used to write. I told them about my third grade teacher, Mrs. Johnson-Lamb, whose husband was a real life auctioneer. I figured it might make them laugh if I tried to imitate an auctioneer.

Then Felix asked, Dada why did you decide to become a doctor, instead of an author, if that was what you really wanted to be?

And I said that I became a doctor because I really wanted to help people, which is true, but that also some part of me still wants to be an author, and Sam asked which part, and I said my left knee and we laughed. And then I said that maybe I still will be an author someday, I’ll keep being a doctor but I’ll be an author too, because it’s possible to be more than one thing, like how you both want to be musician welders. Or welder musicians. I forget which and sometimes the order is very important, to my four- and six-year-old.

Maybe someday I will be an author. A doctor author, or an author doctor. Right now the order isn’t so important, to me as a forty-something-year-old. Can I be three things? A dad doctor author? Really, if I had to choose just one right now, that would be it. A dad.

September 2018

Next Tuesday will mark the 17th anniversary of 9/11.

In those 17 years the world has added more than a billion people. For Earth to reach its first one-billion-person mark (i.e., 1 billion people alive on the planet at one time) took, depending on when one defines humankind as a species, between 500,000 and 3 million years. In fact, it was only 10,000 years ago when Earth's total population was only 10 million. Twice this number now live in greater New York City.

If all 7.5 billion people alive today spoke aloud 100 words—as of this next dash, I’m writing 102—each taking 45 seconds to do so (it took me 46 seconds to read to that dash), then it would take one person 142 lifetimes of 75 years each to hear every spoken word.

If anger, such as that that led to 9/11, is grounded in fear, fear is grounded in misunderstanding, misunderstanding might be overcome through dialogue, and it is mathematically impossible for even one single person to hear just 100 words from every other person, we clearly have to find another route to peace. Fortunately there are attainable routes open to us. Let’s say every person alive met for an hour in groups of 10 people to come up with one best idea for peace and a representative to carry that idea forward, the following day the representatives met in groups of 10 to select the very best of the 10 ideas, and so on. Within 9 hours spread over 9 days, 100 “best of the best” ideas selected from the voices of all the world’s population could be identified.

Somewhere in between 9 hours and 142 lifetimes, then, might be the time required for humanity to better understand itself, stop fighting wars, and perhaps slow and reverse our growth rate to the point that we could live sustainably on our finite planet. If the last 17 years are any indication then we are on a timeline closer to the latter number. Let us hope—and, thankfully, there are indications of this—that our capacity for justice, compassion, and sustainability might accelerate in a matter akin to the acceleration of so many other trends. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The time is now.

The Realm of Monsters

Every time I turn on my computer
I dive down to Lalotai
the realm of monsters
every time I have to look up something
such as, was it the realm? the world? the domain of monsters?
every time I open thesaurus.com to find another word for realm,
I am confronted with a monster in a hairpiece attacking our planet
and a brilliant little beetle called the Natural Resources Defense Council
asking for pennies to fight him
every time I make it to another tab to type in Moana
I learn that Moana is not the name of a Disney movie Moana is our grandmother
the Pacific Ocean
and looking up THAT takes me to a blog on the cultural appropriateness
of a movie depicting Pacific Islanders
by one Amulya Chintaluri
who lives in Hyderabad
which is the fourth-largest monster in India
(India is not a Pacific Island)
Hyderabad, India, the fourth-largest monster on the Indian subcontinent
at only 6.7 million humans and counting
(you have to get to Guwahati, #47, to drop below a million
[just 10,000 years ago the human population of our entire planet
was 10 million])
every time I push the little round button with the open circle
and a line at the top
and listen to the ominously musical machine whirring to life
I know that death awaits at every turn
at every turn is distraction leading down a tunnel to blackness
to tentacles grabbing and spiky fish swimming past
cartoon heroines and vapidly overstuffed heroes
vying for my attention and not caring
not caring
whether I land on Motunui, paradise,
or am struck down by Te Ka, the lava monster
not caring
if my cursor alights on Lalotai or the crime against
Standing Rock
or the effrontery that is an indoor ski resort in 110-degree Dubai
not caring whether I drown in the beautiful waters of Cenote Il Kil
or choke on the 34-times-the-size-of-Manhattan amount of plastic
that we dump into the Ocean every single year
caring only
that the seconds
and the minutes
and the hours
tick away
on my computer screen.
That is how the monsters win.

Climate Change and Health

NOTE: At the time I drew these pictures a year ago, to accompany a Resolution presented to the Washington Academy of Family Physicians House of Delegates, the focus was on climate change and the family physician. The lessons apply to us all--and we are, or can be, healers, in the broadest sense.

Hopefully the pictures mostly speak for themselves. A few points of clarification and intent:

First, on the “less-busy” side: On a finite planet, any species must eventually reach equilibrium with its environment. In a traditional graph it’s difficult to appreciate that this holds true for humans. To capture our growth in the last 200 years from 1 billion to 7 billion, everything prior to 1800 looks pretty flat. Yet it’s anything but. As the log-log scale shows, we’ve had one series of exponential leaps after another, and every time the curve gets close to flattening, a new “advance” results in another order-of-magnitude population growth. The great hazard is that our last two (or more) leaps have likely been unsustainable. Oil provides both the energy, through mechanized harvesting, as well as literally the substance, through petro-fertilizers, of our food growing. And biotechnology, while it has delayed the crashes predicted by Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 “The Population Bomb”, has resulted in further dramatic growth while increasing our reliance on mono-crops, which could prove susceptible to massive failures of disease, drought, or heat. The larger question is, even if we could produce vastly more food, would this result in improved quality of life, or even less worldwide hunger? To date it hasn’t.

The bottom of the page shows atmospheric CO2 in the last several hundred thousand years. Though we don’t have one continuous, unbroken record dating back to Earth’s formation, we do have, from ice cores looking at different carbon and oxygen isotopes, excellent data. What this graph can’t show, because of scale, is a comparison to the last known major warming period post-dinosaur extinction (65M years ago). But we know a lot about this period, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, which occurred 55M years ago. At that time, massive release of carbon dioxide led to a period of global warming. Geologists have often used the PETM as the best recent analogy to today’s warming and CO2 levels. It has been offered in the lay press as a reassuring comparison, because while certain ocean species suffered extinction rates of at least 50%, most land animals did well. However, as described in geologist Robert Hazen’s 2013 book “The Story of Earth”, recent ice-core evidence has shaken scientists by revealing that The PETM’s 5 degree Celsius warming occurred over a time period of 10,000 to 20,000 years, and the CO2 release was also slow. Today’s rise in CO2 levels is at least 10x as fast, and the projected temperature increase—currently we are on track for 5-6C by 2100, the non-binding Paris agreement doing nothing concrete to slow this—is thus occurring at a rate 100 to 200x as fast.

This brings us to the “busy” side and the heart of the matter starting with Wile E. Coyote in the upper left: we are stepping off a cliff. What that cliff represents is a huge number of positive feedback loops, processes we’re setting in motion that will likely continue even if all emissions stopped tomorrow. This in combination with our population growth makes our current history frighteningly akin, as journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues in “The Sixth Extinction”, to the K-T boundary (dinosaurs) or one of Earth’s other 5 mass extinctions. I call your attention to three of those: in the far upper right, as the permafrost melts, it will release huge sinks of methane, which is 20 to 80 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat. Near the bottom left, as the ocean acidifies, we’re facing the loss of the very phytoplankton that both absorb CO2 and provide half of our breathable oxygen. And back to the upper right: Severe weather, such as multi-year droughts that Syria and other places are already in the midst of, are causing or exacerbating civil unrest while simultaneously stripping the resultant climate refugees of land to which they might otherwise relocate.

Thus in the center of the page: We are, already, in a crisis of the health of the public. Here and abroad the entire public sector is being slashed and/or privatized even as the wealth of the very very richest increases. This phenomenon is well-described by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine” (one example being New Orleans during and since Hurricane Katrina), and in her latest book, “This Changes Everything” she makes the compelling case that climate change could push public infrastructure past its breaking point.

And finally, the lower right, the family doctor! Why the family doctor? Because no one is talking about this. Because we give voice to our most vulnerable patients and communities. Because we have an opportunity to build something better. It would be easy to say, “If the door to 2 degrees C closes next year, does it really matter what we do?” Yet we really do have a unique chance to both slow down emissions and, in the process, mitigate the effects of climate change by building a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.

For a moment, and it is likely a brief moment, there is more than enough wealth in the world to bring about enormous good. The challenge is that wealth is concentrated, as per the extreme lower right corner, in the hands of a very very few individuals. Over a decade ago a study found that the world’s 3 richest men controlled assets greater than the world poorest 48 countries. The statistics have only worsened since then. In America today top CEOs make more in a year than their employees could make in 350 years, or 7 generations each working 50 years. Nearly everyone in the world would benefit in the short- and long-term by investing some of this wealth in the strategies proven to increase world peace and stability, namely, improving the educational status, economic status, and reproductive rights of women and children. And even the super-rich would benefit from this approach in the long-term, because no ultimately no one wins, if we all lose a livable planet.

This, I believe, is what we must stand up for. If not us, who, if not now, when?

42

For anyone who has read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series: I have arrived at the answer.

For anyone who hasn’t: The answer (only, of course, the answer to life, the universe, and everything) is 42.

The question, of course, is what is the question?

Recently I’ve started my second attempt at reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, this time as an audiobook that I can digest while working out or driving. LL had suggested I read it a while ago. Maybe a year or more ago. To my credit, I did start. It’s just that I don’t actually get far with reading books these days, unless it’s Moomin, Mymble and Little My, or perhaps Madeline, or Monster Trucks—our 2-year-old’s current favorite, featuring trucks that are actually monsters (I’m embarrassed to admit it’s actually growing on me). So right before a recent trip to Seattle I purchased the recorded version of Daring Greatly and started listening, again, as it were.

The truth is, I wasn’t quite ready to hear what I was reading, the first time around. I thought that I really “didn’t do shame.” I feel more ready now. The ready-ness journey has not been an easy one, and it is very much a journey that is ongoing, but I will say that it received a bolt and a jolt, a bump and a thump (to borrow from another favorite, the Meg and Mog series) from last fall’s election. Daring Greatly, for those of you who haven’t wandered into Brené Brown territory, is about shame, vulnerability, and the excruciating, exquisite transformation that happens when we “show up and let ourselves be seen.” It is not that I suffered from a terrible back-log of shame that needed to be worked through. It was and is more that I’ve become more aware of the small moments when I’m either turning towards life, as painful and awkward as it can be, or turning away. And I’m trying to turn towards.

So I’ve finally posted the essay I wrote, well, about a year ago. See my last posting prior to this. At the time I wrote it I knew it was premature. I knew that were I to post it at that time…well, it just didn’t seem right. It was “laying it all out there,” but I hadn’t yet put in any of the real work of relationship-building that I recognized I needed to do. Now, I think, I have embarked on that path. I am doing my best to put in the time and effort. It is exhausting, at times terrifying, and so, so liberating. I am also coming to grips with a basic truth that I already knew years and years ago; in fact I wrote and illustrated my own children’s book on the subject. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance. The opposite of scarcity is enough.

What does any of this have to do with the recent election and with the number 42? And, what is the question?

For me it is this:
We live on a dying planet, by which I mean that we are in the midst of the greatest life extinction event since the K-T (end of dinosaurs) boundary. We are living under a fascist regime that all of us bear some responsibility for allowing to happen, and all of us bear some responsibility for dismantling. Am I willing to speak up about this?

I am but one small scared white privileged straight male 42-year-old homo sapiens. Only through collective action will any of the above (regarding the planet) change. Am I willing to, not from a place of guilt, or despair, but from a place of love, hope, and possibility, reach out to those not like me, to make the world a better place?

Of the qualities I listed above (regarding myself), there is only one that I can change.
There is only one I can let go of.

Am I willing to let go of my fear?

Yes.

Why I’ve always hated the term “At a Crossroads”

**NOTE: I ORIGINALLY WROTE THIS IN MARCH 2016. IT'S TAKEN ME A YEAR TO PUBLISH IT.**
-NJH, APRIL 2017

When I was a kid growing up, my family didn’t own a television. But once a year we would make the epic drive from Halfway, OR, to Toppenish, WA, where we’d stay with family friends, go to the State Fair up in Yakima, and, most significantly, wake up at the crack of dawn to watch all the Saturday morning cartoons we could stomach. So while I have no idea what people are talking about when they mention past (or current—I’ve never owned a TV) shows, I at least have a basic cultural reference point when it comes to, say, Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.

One iconic image has been replaying itself over and over in my head of late: that combined suspension of disbelief, and gravity, where Wiley has run off the edge of a cliff but not yet accepted the fact of his fall.

“Hate” is a strong word (see “Cars”, 8/31/13). So I’ll just say I’ve always found the term “at a crossroads” woefully inadequate to describe situations such as less than half of Earth’s current species surviving into the 22nd century, where we humans are driving this cataclysm. The reversal needed to give our planet better odds is just not captured by the image of a bucolic

footpath on which stands a culturally neutral forest critter—a squirrel comes to mind—calming choosing between the left and right arrows hand-painted on a quaint wooden sign. The action needed is not a leisurely choice between two paths both rooted on solid ground. The action needed is an emergency pair of (solar-powered, of course) rocket thrusters to be turned on full throttle in reverse, in hopes of crashing backwards into the side of the cliff rather than continuing to plummet into thin air.

I’ve long favored (and recently employed) the image of Wile E. Coyote to describe humanity’s race through the next 50-100 years. I never imagined that such a picture would describe the state of my own future as a husband and a father.

As a spouse and a dad right now I’m in that very thin air. I’m trying to activate my emergency rocket boosters and catch the edge of the cliff instead of plummeting to the rocks far below.

Right now I’m writing this blog on a scrap of paper. I’m sitting in my parked car listening to a marimba CD for the 11th time straight through. In the back seat my 3-year-old son is finally starting to stir, having slept the last 30 minutes here in the parking lot of our hotel near Stanley Park. The hour before that he passed out and slept for a fossil-fuel-consuming driving tour of Vancouver, BC, that eventually, and thankfully, included 30 minutes parked in a quiet residential neighborhood on the north side of the Lion’s Gate Bridge. Prior to that, the epic, screaming, kicking meltdown in the Japanese restaurant, and before that, last night’s head-turning, child-protective-services-call-eliciting (had anyone had a conscience), absolute meltdown in Stanley Park itself. A couple days before that, my own loud, cursing meltdown on a public street in Victoria. My frustration had been in part at having waited half an hour in the cold for a bus that came only minutes after we’d abandoned the bus stop. It was part at being back in a walking orthotic boot as another chapter in a saga of chronic foot injuries. And it was in no small part at the dawning recognition that I am not being the parent nor the person I aspire to be.

It’s been quite the Canadian vacation.

On our ferry ride up from Port Angeles, we found ourselves engaged in a warm exchange with two men. Amusingly, I mistook them for father and son. The “son”, it turned out, was working to put up signs advising motorists of the planetary health effects of our fuel emissions, akin to how cigarette packages carry a human health warning label. The “dad”—they were, in fact, travelling together—was working at similar if less-direct action at Victoria’s Environmental Law Center.

He had written a book, he told us, that at one time was a Canadian best-seller, “Becoming the Kind Father.”

The universe works in funny ways. Sometimes clues are subtle and other times (as when, for example, one chooses to ignore the subtle ones) they are more direct. Here we were, journeying through Victoria on our way to Vancouver to see Naomi Klein speak on climate change and capitalism, and we run into a man offering a possible path to better parenthood. At the time I thought, “that sounds kind of interesting.” Now, several collapses of serenity later, I am feeling more and more that I, like Wile E. Coyote, am not at a crossroads. I’m about to crash and burn.

Fear

Once a month LL spends her Friday evening at a women’s dance gathering. The boys and I stay home and watch part of a movie. The boys are 2 and 4. As a family physician I’m well aware of the recommendation to limit screen time, along with the solid evidence between all the other things one could be doing with that time—reading, playing outside, making music, engaging with friends—and better health. Probably more importantly, my own parents raised me without a TV, and we don’t own one. For the occasional movie we set up a projector and screen.

So up until tonight (not counting the Winnie-the-Pooh movies that their Nana and Papa allow them) our boys had seen a total of two movies, both by director Hayao Miyazaki: Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. Watching a little over half an hour at a time, we’ve seen each film now twice all the way through.

Tonight we decided to branch out and try something different: 2014’s highly acclaimed Song of The Sea.

We made it about 20 minutes in.

At that point we had to stop. Our 4-year-old was terrified. My good friend (not coincidentally, a pediatrician), who lent me the movie and whose 2-year-old loves it, had warned us that there were scary parts. I do not believe we made it to any of the scary parts. My son was crying because the main character and her older brother were being taken away from their father to live with their unsmiling grandmother. Again and again I was asked, “Why was she so mean?”…“Why was she making them do things they didn’t want to?”…and most of all, “Why was she not listening to them?”

Over an hour later—after reassuring, coming up with no less than seventeen possible explanations for why she was so mean, reassuring, watching some of the familiar Totoro, reassuring, brushing teeth, reassuring, pee in the potty, reassuring, reading a story, reassuring, carrying upstairs, reassuring, lights out, reassuring, a long giraffe family story, our repertoire of eight songs, hugs, kisses and gobbles, love sparkles, and more reassuring—I was able to reflect on why this movie had evoked such a strong fear response.

In our family we value listening, empathy, explanation, and love. Equally, we value responsibility, natural limits, community, and helping others. Looking back at the short clip of the movie we saw, the whole thing was terrifying. The little girl who is the central figure is mute. She cannot be heard because she has no voice. Her older brother, to whom she clings, is clearly antagonistic towards her. Her father loves them both, but takes no responsibility in protecting them from a figure who is a caricature of evil. There was no community because they lived alone on an island. I was terrified too! In reading, afterwards, Wikipedia’s plotline, the obvious was stated: of course things get better. Her brother sticks up for her. Her muteness is explained. The family is reunited. Even the grandmother isn’t so bad. I’m familiar with the elements of the Hero’s Journey, and I don’t doubt that the rest of the movie lives up to its reviews. At the same time I understand why it was so scary. Up to the part where we hit “STOP”, there was very little that was not a direct threat to everything we’ve tried to instill in our little guys.

This is not to say that we will never again venture beyond our same safe two Miyazaki films…though I did promise our 4-year-old we’d shelve Song of the Sea for now.

Yet neither is it in any way a cautionary note to self that we’re over-sheltering our kids. There is so much fear and actual horror in the world right now that the last thing I want is to try to numb our boys by exposing them to any significant fraction of the 200,000 acts of onscreen violence the average American child sees by age 18. There is also so much incredible beauty, kindness, selfless heroism, creativity, collaboration and community in this world, and these things tend to get an ever-shrinking amount of our focus, much less media time, beyond the walls of preschool. If our son experienced genuine fear at the depiction of a separation of family, that is a very natural and healthy fear. I feel grateful that he has the vocabulary and courage to express his feelings and ask for what he needed in that moment.

And of the seventeen explanations that I came up with for why the grandmother was so mean, the one my boys liked the best was, “maybe she just didn’t get enough ice cream!” Think I’ll go have some myself so that I never turn into a mean dad.

Post-election world

My head is reeling from all the various links people have sent me and I want to share some quick thoughts-to-myself as I try to process it all:

Staying positive. A lot of negative post-election analysis out there, important for understanding perhaps; also a lot of positive organizing/momentum to focus energy on.

Staying connected. For me one smile, hug, or phone call is worth a million internet articles.

Remembering human goodness. A lot of good and suffering people on both sides cast their ballots in hopes of a better future, and we are all in this together.

Remembering the big picture. I keep coming back to “350”…we’ve surged past 350ppm CO2 and only concerted action will slow climate change, and climate change will exacerbate the fate of the less fortunate in a world where CEOs currently make (on average for Fortune-500 Co’s) 350x the salaries of their lowest-paid workers.

___________________________________

Here are some links I’ve found helpful:

“House of Straw: How Washington’s tax system undermines our economic future—and how to fix it”—a very readable primer on WA’s highly regressive tax structure (worst in the 50 States!)
http://www.eoionline.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/tax-reform/house-of-straw-wa-tax-structure-oct12-web.pdf

The L-curve: a graphic representation of wealth distribution in the US:
http://www.lcurve.org,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woIkIph5xcU

The Spiritual Grandmothers on a helpful framework in which to place our president-elect
https://www.facebook.com/mare.cromwell/posts/10155097776934796

An article I found OUTSTANDING, from a friend, understanding the reasons why many Trump voters cast their ballot for him:
http://www.nationofchange.org/2016/11/22/we-are-all-deplorables/
(and the first link therein explains the “deplorables” comment Clinton made…)

And this much, much longer article really gets to the heart of value-based voting (and what we can do)--
http://www.nationofchange.org/2016/11/26/minority-president-polls-failed-majority-can/


Classim.org has some good articles on neoliberalism and its endorsement of a winner/loser world, and a related article (sent to me by the same site) stresses the need for reaching out across ideologic lines:
http://www.classism.org/the-demise-of-neoliberalism/
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/george-lakey/without-empathy-for-trump-voters-movements-can-t-succeed

Finally, for anyone interested in supporting what I characterize as a “climate-and-how-it-hurts-the-most-vulnerable” group, 350.org, which is very active in the Standing Rock movement, here’s their link:
https://350.org

Vote Hillary Clinton

It's been 6 months since I wrote. But this posting isn't about me.

In the madhouse that American politics has become, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that critically important issues hang in the balance. Hillary Clinton stands on the right side of every one of those issues compared to her rival. And while Obama wasn't my first choice in 2008 (Dennis Kucinich was) and I would be voting for Bernie Sanders if he were still in the race, he isn't. In fact, it's harder to find a stronger endorsement of Clinton than from Sanders: "Any objective observer will conclude that--based on her ideas and her leadership--Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States."

What are these critically important stances, for which Clinton must, must, must be elected?

First is a livable planet. I don't just mean "the environment" as some bucolic ideal removed from everyday life, but rather, the fact that our carbon emissions are altering the Earth's climate so rapidly that we are already in the midst of a mass extinction event. For further reading I'd direct you to Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Sixth Extinction", or, for a shorter starting read, her 2006 New Yorker article, "The Darkening Seas". The latter outlines how even if we had stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow--10 years ago!--we've already released enough CO2 into the atmosphere to radically acidify the oceans and cause massive die-offs, die-offs we're already starting to see, for example, in oyster beds here in the waters of Puget Sound. While the ability of any one President to halt or slow this process, much less reverse it, is limited, at least Clinton acknowledges that climate change is real. And, she has a cerebral cortex that can be engaged.

Second is a livable planet. I don't mean a peaceful, hand-holding lovefest where we all sing Kumbaya and drink hot cocoa made with vegan coconut milk and fair-trade organic chocolate. I simply mean a world where we don't shoot each other, lock each other up, and build walls between each other, just because we don't all have the same skin color or speak the same language or share the same religion. Somehow, soon, we've got to figure out how to live together, all of us, or we might die together, all of us. Check out "Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?" by Alan Weisman. Clinton is far from a peace-wager. But she is less likely to accidentally, or intentionally, nuke Iran, or Mexico, or New Hampshire...wait, isn't that one of ours?...in the first 5 minutes of her time in office. And, she has a cerebral cortex that can be engaged.

Third is a livable planet. And I don't mean a U.N.-controlled socialism-faced wealth-redistributing egalitarian democracy, for heaven's sake. I just mean that if we're going to learn to live together--both as people, see point two, and as people with the planet that sustains us, see point one, all evidence points to the idea that healthier societies are more equal. Not equal. Just more equal. Less un-equal. Currently, in the US, the average CEO in a Fortune 500 company will earn more in a year than could be earned by 7 generations of his lowest-paid worker each working for 50 years. (yes, that's 350x as much.) That's a hard truth to reconcile with the idea that all individuals are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights. See "The Spirit Level" by Picket and Wilkinson for more on this. It may be hard to endorse Clinton, who has received millions from large corporations in speaker fees, though it could be argued that this is the soul-selling necessary to play the game as it's currently played. But she at least pays lip service to policies aimed at reducing inequality, instead of boasting about the power that wealth buys her. And, she has a cerebral cortex that can be engaged.

Vote Hillary Clinton. Our lives depends on it. She's not perfect. But she's the only electable choice. And, she has a cerebral cortex that can be engaged.

Autonomous interdependent gratitude

Thank you to my mother. For the month of March, she made our little family a “March Advent”, and every day my boys (and LL & I) have delighted in opening a package wrapped in brown parcel paper. For my birthday I received a tribute poem to Nelson Mandela, written by Maya Angelou and brimming with images of Madiba, which brought tears to my eyes. On the package she’d affixed a horoscope for Aires that read, “You love autonomy. You specialize in getting the freedom and sovereignty you require. You are naturally skilled at securing your independence from influences that might constrain your imagination and limit your self-expression. But here’s a sticking point: If you want the power to help shape group processes, you must give up some of your autonomy. In order to motivate allies to work toward shared goals, you need to practice the art of interdependence. The next test of your ability to do this is coming right up.”

Thank you to dictionary.com. It informs me that autonomy comes from the Greek root auto, self, plus nom, or law: self-governance, self-determination, independence (not to say self-control!) Consider how highly—in the U.S.—we hold those values, as compared to their opposites. Even “interdependence” and its synonyms “symbiosis” and “cooperation” can draw frowns in our radically go-it-alone culture, while from “dependence” it is a short slide to “addiction” and the double-edged sword of “faith”. (I once watched a TED talk whose thesis was that doubt is the essence of faith, an idea I have to think might benefit the devout in any radical belief sect. Even my own, of what I might call “Earthism”.) What I need is a radical shift towards recognition of the interconnectedness of all life, including the ripple effects of my everyday smallest actions.

Thank you to Tanmeet Sethi. Tanmeet was one of my mentors in residency. She has a son, Zubin, who was born with muscular dystrophy. Thank you, Tanmeet, for sharing your story with the world via your own TED talk on the power of gratitude. What a gift.

Thank you to Randall Battle for teaching me how to play guitar, or at least, to do the very best he could in the short space of several hour-long sessions every week or two for a few months in the time right before our family left the Okanogan.

Thank you to my friends, colleagues and most of all LL, who tolerated, encouraged, and even did their best to work with me on, submission of another resolution to this year’s Washington Academy of Family Physicians’ House of Delegates. This one is no less than a call to action for the preservation of our own species, a fate inseparably linked to that of so many other species. If this is what my horoscope is trying to tell me, that is, to let go of my attachment to the specifics in order to achieve any good at all, then I will do my best to listen.

Thank you to my boys for bearing with me as I learn to be a kinder and more patient father.

Thank you to Bill Manahan, whom I credit with teaching me the little song our family sings every night along with fun hand gestures: "Thank you for this food, this wonderful wonderful food, and the animals, the fruits and vegetables, and the human hands, that made it possible."

Thank you to all those I've thought of but have run out of time to record in this very very short list of thanks!

Happy Leap Year!

Check out the Leap Manifesto by Naomi Klein et al.!

The Dark Side ii*

Disclaimer: Episode VII, “The Force Awakens”, is not reviewed in this blog.

But it does make an appearance.

On the first Saturday of the New Year LL and I have our second actual date night since before our first child was born. It is fabulous. We check into our hotel early, then meander down to a coffee shop for afternoon coffee and a freshly baked chocolate tart. Fabulous. Then back to the hotel, then out for a leisurely dinner. The hotel is fabulous. Dinner is fabulous. LL checks her phone one last time before the movie: the boys are doing great. We go next door to the Rose Theater for the first episode of Star Wars released in a decade, and the first not under the direct control of George Lucas. The movie, too, is fabulous. It is hard to imagine a more blissful half-day.

Three hours after the start of Star Wars we are back in our hotel trying to fall asleep. My mind is still going, maybe not 100 miles an hour, but more than 10—a long ways from sleep speed—when our next-door neighbors arrive back to the hotel. We’ve never met them in person and likely never will. They are loud. Loud for the hour, loud for the type of hotel we’re in, loud period.

I would like to say that I do the grown-up thing, ring the operator, and ask him to intervene. This would not only be more polite, it would likely be both more effective and efficient. And here’s the rub: even as I consider my course of action, the one that I’m allowing myself to lean towards makes me angrier and more awake. I was already aware, before our hotel-mates arrived and started making so much noise, that I should have gotten up and done something to wind down: draw a picture, maybe journal a little. Now, even if my action results in quiet, I’m very unlikely to fall asleep anytime soon. But I do it anyway. I knock on the wall. At first pretty softly. Then, when nothing changes, a bit more assertively.

The voices do quiet down. Now I’m riled up but stubbornly stay in bed. We try turning on the bathroom fan for a little white noise, but it’s got an occasional rattle that results in the opposite of the desired soothing effect. Finally I do get up out of bed and start to write. The light of the microwave I open up, which is the dimmest thing I can find to turn on, is small enough it doesn’t shine into the bedroom where LL still is. I’m starting to feel better.

And then, a good hour after my knock on the wall, comes the retaliatory pound.

I leap up, rip the microwave oven from the counter, storm out into the hall, and throw the oven through—no, no. There’s no question that I am furious. But this time reason prevails and I call the operator.

All noise ceases, but now I’m fully angry. LL is up too, of course. I want to leave. The hotel. Right now. On principle. I’m not staying here. I’m not sleeping here. I want a full refund, and I want it now. How dare…yes, I get it, I’m acting worse than either our 1-year-old or 3-year-old is capable of. The Force has been Awakened, and I’m sad to say it is not the Light Side.

Thankfully LL talks some sense into me and we do stay. We stay, I write some more, I allow some forgiveness, I forgive our neighbors, I forgive myself, and we get some sleep, far more sleep than we would have gotten (obviously) if we’d packed up, driven up the hill to where our boys were staying with Nana and Papa, and likely woken everyone up. As it is we sleep until eight. Eight! That is fabulous! We soon learn that our 1-year-old, usually up at six, had gotten up at five!

Before leaving the hotel I write our neighbors an apology and place it in their door. I am genuinely sorry. They probably had no idea they were being so loud. They were, after all, just talking; it just happened to be right on the other side of what was obviously a fairly thin wall.

As I write about this now I think back to last month’s entry, which was also about a situation falling apart and about “digging myself in deeper.” Is there such thing as The Force, an intangible yet quite consequential energy that exists in all living things but especially in the relationship between them? Absolutely. Is there a Light Side and a Dark Side to that Force? Absolutely. Is this Force explainable in terms of evolutionary psychology, in terms of adaptive actions that had and have benefits for their actors?

Absolutely. In the span of human history, itself a blink, a half-blink, in the history of the planet, we have evolved a set of behaviors that has factored into our remarkable and meteoric rise. Some of these behaviors would make Darth Vader blush, others are more altruistic that Obi-Wan could possibly imagine. We label them “good” and “evil” and every shade in between, and yet all of them meet or in the past met, on some level, some need of ours. One could certainly make a strong argument that many of the behaviors we developed that served us well throughout most of our tenure, when we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers at direct risk from the environment and from each other, no longer serve us in today’s uber-connected and uber-crowded world.

The challenge we now face is not whether or not we can evolve quickly enough. In terms of actions needed to reverse or at least stay a future of catastrophic climate change and mass species extinction, we don’t have centuries or even decades but likely years. I don’t want to say we “can’t” evolve quickly enough. I love the Brian Andreas quote that says “if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination.” So anything is possible. It’s just that evolution, at least in traditional terms of behavioral traits passed down through genetic mutations, won’t give us enough time.

The real question then becomes, can we imagine enough? What I do know is that we can’t do it alone. That I can’t do it alone. My imagination, alone, isn’t big enough. My emotional self isn’t even big enough to not bang on my neighbor’s wall at midnight! That’s why I write in a public space, and why, after years, I’m finally starting to re-kindle connections to others. To those heard but unseen neighbors: I gave you my email address. I hope you write. I truly wish you nothing but the best. I wish all of us nothing but the best. We’re all in this together. And all questions of morality aside, what I do know is this: The Dark Side is less fun! ☺

*ii: "episode i"--I wrote a post titled "The dark side" in November 2009. Obviously I must complete at least "ix" episodes!

The morning mail, or something like that, or actually not at all

It has been a terrible morning.

There is no question that I’m given to hyperbole on both the positive and negative ends of the spectrum. Recently all the providers at my new clinic were asked to submit a brief bio for our website, and I wrote, speaking in the third person, “[he] thinks that he is the luckiest person in the whole world.” And a good part of the time that’s true. But I suppose it should not be surprising that someone who sometimes feels on top of the world might at other times feel the entire weight of it. Isn’t there a DSM-5 diagnosis and medication for that? Increasingly though, I seem to be granted insight into both the highs and lows, one that tempers, if not obviates, the need to seek professional help.

Hyperbole notwithstanding—it has been a terrible morning. First, as I am making a smoothie, I spill half of the can of coconut milk into the open silverware drawer. Not having time to clean it up right away I throw a towel into the drawer and forget about it. Then it’s time to get Felix up, but both Sam and I are on the increased bowel transit program this morning, and a long stint in the bathroom (mine) bookended by two poopy diaper changes (Sam’s) puts us quite a bit behind in making it upstairs. After some high-level negotiations I manage to get Felix downstairs and seated at the breakfast table. Things go relatively smoothly, and both boys in fact eat quite well. I even play them a breakfast song on my guitar. And then, forgetting how late it is, I decide to clean up the kitchen.

“Triage” would be a better word. Dishes from the day before are still stacked in precarious edifices around the kitchen. I’ll be able to unload the dishwasher, at least. I pull open the silverware drawer. Oh, yeah. Ok. Unload everything. But where to put it? No counterspace. Shove things around, remove the liner…ecch, wow, there’s more than fresh coconut milk under there. Need paper towels.

Out of paper towels. Well, four-letter-word. Ok. Safeway. Let’s go. We’re out of avocados, bananas, and dish soap anyway. Let’s pack up and go. Wait, how did it get to be 10:30? I’ve accomplished nothing!

Up to so far the boys have been peaches. Now, however, at the mention of an unplanned outing, resistance is voiced. I’m not having it. Oh—wait. The I’m-not-having-it approach doesn’t work with 3-year-olds. How many times must I bang my head against that brick wall to realize that pushing harder doesn’t actually achieve the desired result? How did it get to be…11:30? More silently voiced four-letter words. Ok! No Safeway! We need some outside running-around time, or the afternoon naps, the cornerstone of parental sanity, are shot!

This is when things go from bad to worse. Having used my limited capital to negotiate a trip to Safeway (part of that hour having been used to supply an overdue snack), I neglect the 2nd cardinal rule of dealing with 3-year-olds: Never say you’re going to do something, and then don’t do it. An hour ago there was less than zero interest in a trip to the grocery store. But that was then. Now it is the official itinerary.

Against my better judgment, I break the contract and carry the boys, wailing, to the school park just a block up the hill. Correction: older boy wailing, younger still a peach.

The funny thing about when things fall apart, is that sometimes I just keep digging myself deeper. Is this why, after an actually quite enjoyable time at the park, I still consent to the promised Safeway trip? That’s madness! It’s lunchtime, to be followed by naptime. There’s a pretty narrow window there, after which the chances of falling asleep decline precipitously. Why do we go?

Go we do, and the slide continues. We arrive back to the car with all groceries purchased just as the clock tower at the courthouse across the street rings one o’clock, the time Sam’s supposed to be asleep. Wait. It gets better. I had put Sam in the cart with two boots on. Now there’s only one. Four-letter four-letter four-letter!

Somehow, we retrace our steps, come up empty, leave our number with the Safeway customer service desk, make it home, eat some left-over smoothie and oats and granola bar, and I get first Sam and then Felix down for nap. Somehow they fall, and stay, asleep. Somehow, amazingly, the message on my voicemail is a nice lady from customer service telling me they’ve found the Bog boot. The afternoon can only be better than the morning. And it will be. But what a morning.

I remember that I used to think that by the time I became a parent, I would have “it” more or less figured out. Whatever “it” was, it has changed, and as a parent changes, daily. This wasn’t even going to be a blog about my morning. It was going to be a blog about our mailbox shelter, the one that I built over the weekend to put over our mailbox because our mail keeps getting soaked. That, like my morning, was hijacked. And that is ok.

I just keep reminding myself of a little saying inscribed on a decorative rock in LL’s parent’s house: “If it’s not fatal, it’s usually no big deal.” Or as Felix would say, “It’s not a big deal, it’s a tiny deal.” The mailbox can wait—it has to anyway, for a second coat of paint. So if you’re on my long list of people that I hope to but haven’t yet sent a letter to…it’s coming!

Syria

Living in Port Angeles, I usually tune in to CBC Radio One from Victoria when I have to drive somewhere for a few minutes. Right now the talk in Canada is all about accommodating 25,000 Syrian refugees in the next two months. Ever since Paris, xenophobic pundits in both Canada and the U.S. have tried to argue, quite naturally (a natural response to any horrific event is to simultaneously lash out and withdraw) but quite illogically (the terrorists responsible for the carnage in France are actually a significant part of those destroying Syria, namely ISIS, and, none of the suspects in Paris were Syrian refugees), that denying safe haven to fleeing women, children and families will somehow make the world a better place.

Many of my blogs focus on the impacts to the natural world of human activity. One might reasonably say that human-caused climate change is first and foremost a humanitarian catastrophe. It is. This statement is not to deny the impact on other species and ecosystems: the two are inseparably linked.

For this month (the blog entered earlier in November, which I just finally added text to last night, was my late entry for October) I thought I would share a cartoon my mom shared with me some months ago. Syria and climate change. My apologies, as always, that you'll have to copy and paste the link:

http://yearsoflivingdangerously.tumblr.com/post/86898140738/this-comic-was-produced-in-partnership-by-years-of

Everything is connected.

Orders of magnitude

(updated with text: Nov 22nd)

I was originally going to title this “See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”, as per my jack o’ lantern theme. On September 28th Shell Oil abandoned its plan to drill in the Arctic. This seemed—especially when followed in early November by Obama’s several-years belated rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline—a major victory against evil, and a cause for celebration. Or, to reframe the descriptor “evil”: these were major victories for anyone who believes that community, the environment, and the current and future livability of our planet are more important than the short-term profit of a handful of already obscenely rich old white men.

These victories are by no means an excuse to close our eyes, mouths or ears to the ongoing injustice and destruction wrought upon the planet and its species (including our own). However, rather than delve into this, let me take a moment to savor these two wins, focus on the hope they bring, and reflect on the scale of what we’re talking about.

In about an hour, with a kitchen knife and a few dollars worth of pie pumpkins, I can carve three fun faces for Halloween, and perhaps bring a smile or two to any parental figures who recognize my motif.

In a few weeks of Arctic summer—had they proceeded—Shell would have carved into the ocean floor, using a rig built in 1985 and retrofitted for $100 million in 2009, perhaps squeezing out a few barrels of oil at the cost of a when-not-if spill that would have imperiled grey whales, polar bears, walruses, seals and salmon, not to mention the symbolic avarice and indiscretion of drilling in the place already most affected by climate change.

In the 65 million years since Earth’s last catastrophic extinction, the forces of evolution, plate tectonics, and climate have created a myriad of fragilely balanced and beautiful ecosystems, of which the Olympic Peninsula is one (pictured is Hurricane Ridge).

In this comparison of orders of magnitude, there is an infinitely greater space between the 2nd and 3rd examples than between the 1st and 2nd. Carving a pumpkin and operating an oil rig are microscopic compared with the creation of a living mountain. With organization and enough pumpkin carvers, I or anyone else could build, or destroy, something comparable to the Transoceanic Polar Pioneer.

And yet our collective actions are without question transforming the world on a scale we can barely fathom. Snowfall on the Olympics may become a thing of the past. Salmon, seals, walruses, polar bears and grey whales, likewise, if ocean acidification unfolds as predicted. If ever there were a time to not lose hope, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—in the space between when I posted the pictures, and now when I’m finally writing, the devastating Paris massacre has added yet another horror—it is now. We are creative individuals. We must now act with purpose, for good.

Dance to this!

For this month’s posting I weighed all kinds of the usual doom and gloom and am instead opting for something lighter. One of the great things about our tiny rental here in PA is that it has a giant, 2-story garage. The 2nd floor is an unfinished space that our landlord eventually plans to develop into an additional dwelling unit…until then, it’s our workout/dance/playspace.

Dance is what got me through college, not just in one piece but in one often-joyous piece. When I started medical school four years later, I was wise enough to know that I needed it, and helped form an eclectic dance group that met weekly for almost 3 years. Letting it lapse because I became “too busy” was one of the biggest follies I’ve ever committed…I still need dance.

Here’s a playlist built for movement, some of it newer stuff, a lot of it older. Enjoy!

All about that base * Meghan Trainor
Hooked on a feeling * Blue Swede (from Guardians of the Galaxy)
This one’s gonna hurt * Reina del Cid. My favorite new artist. Check out “Library Girl” too!
White walls * Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Thanks Emmy!!!
Piece of my heart * Shaggy…a reggae cover of Janis Joplin
I saw her standing there * The Beatles
Ex’s and oh’s * Elle King
Peter Pan * Diam’s. French HIP hip hop. To borrow the line from MC Hammer, “if you can’t move to this then you probably are dead.”
I’m walking on sunshine * Katrina and the Waves
New York groove * Ace Frehley…featured in the movie “Inside Job”, a must-see.
Le Fleuve * Miriam Makeba
Start me up * The Rolling Stones
Ca plane pour moi * Plastic Bertrand (from Ruby Sparks)
The one! * Hugh Masakela
Walk of life * Dire Straits…in my top 5 favorite songs of all time
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles * MC Hammer—not to be confused with the cartoon theme. This is from the original live-action movie, in my book the best of the many versions by far.
You can’t hurry love * The Supremes with Diana Ross
Jump in the line * Harry Belafonte (Beetlejuice…I’ve got a lot of movies represented here!)
Lean on me * Club Nouveau. Also in the top 5.
Crazy in love * Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z
Hey Ya * Outkast. Thanks L-Dawg!!!
Mes oreilles * Amylie. More French hip hop pop.
Little Hands * Matt the Electrician. My other favorite new artist besides Reina del Cid.
Paper planes * M.I.A. (yep, also in another must-see movie, Slumdog Millionaire…)
Nothing matters when we’re dancing * The Magnetic Fields
Cecilia * Paul Simon. How many songs do I get in my top 5?
Angel * They Might Be Giants. Possibly my #1 favorite song of all time. It has to be the version from their live album, though.

That should be enough to get you started. ☺