Wyzga On Words

Advice To Graduates: Life Will Be Hard; Make Mistakes; Fix The World; Be True To Yourself; And So On.

Elliott Richardson gave the commencement address to my college graduating class.  I don't remember what he said so much as what he had done: as attorney general he stood up to then-President Richard M. Nixon and refused to fire the Special Prosecutor investigating Watergate.  His moral stand and subsequent resignation hearkens back to a much earlier time, one that Maureen Dowd longs for in her editorial, "Moral Dystopia."  Excerpt.

"EVERYONE is good, until we’re tested.

We hope we would be Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons,” who dismisses his daughter’s pleas to compromise his ideals and save his life, saying: “When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.”

But with formerly hallowed institutions and icons sinking into a moral dystopia all around us, has our sense of right and wrong grown more malleable? What if we’re not Thomas More but Mike McQueary?"

Richardson was tested.  His actions are his legacy.

It would be too easy to say that in the years since I stood alone and applauded Richardson's address I became a lawyer and stood up to wrongdoers to model his role.  My mother would just tell you that I was always a head-strong independent soul rooting for the underdog while marching to a distant drummer.

What I do want to know is what today's graduates will take from the plethora of commencement speeches given by the notables and quotables whose earnest, funny, somber and encouraging words come to us in snippets in todays NYTimes, "Familiar Faces Offering Advice, Idealism and Humor."  Excerpt.

"But uplift and idealism still ruled. Graduates were exhorted to do great things, look out for others and maybe, just maybe, put aside their electronic devices for a few minutes. The nearest to universal advice was that graduates should chase what they love, and heal what ails humanity."

Here are a few of my favorites:

NEIL GAIMAN, AUTHOR

University of the Arts

“Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience. Usually I didn’t wind up getting the money, either.” “Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. I.R.S. on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil, or it’s all been done before? Make good art.”

LAWRENCE LESSIG, LEGAL SCHOLAR

John Marshall Law School in Atlanta

“There is no one in the criminal justice system who believes that system works well. There is no one in housing law who believes this is what law was meant to be. ... The law of real people doesn’t work, even if the law of corporations does. ... The law has convinced most Americans that the law is for the rich, except that part of the law that involves the prisons. We, all of us, have a duty to fix this. To repair this. To make it better.”

CORY A. BOOKER, MAYOR OF NEWARK

Bard College

“Go out there and swear to this world your oath, not with your words, but with what you do. Not with your hand over your heart, but with your hand outstretched to a world that desperately needs your hand, your help, your insights, your creativity, your honor, your courage. It needs you.”  “My dad would always tease me: ‘Boy, don’t you walk around here like you hit a triple. You were born on third base, boy.’ ... I drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that I did not dig. I eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for me by my ancestors. I sit under the shade of trees that were planted and cultivated and cared for by those who I will never know.”

AARON SORKIN, WRITER AND PRODUCER

Syracuse University

“To get where you’re going, you have to be good, and to be good where you’re going, you have to be damned good. Every once in a while, you’ll succeed. Most of the time you’ll fail, and most of the time the circumstances will be well beyond your control.”  “You’re too good for schadenfreude, you’re too good for gossip and snark, you’re too good for intolerance — and since you’re walking into the middle of a presidential election, it’s worth mentioning that you’re too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy.”

To those of you setting out, every good wish for health, prosperity and joy.  For those of us still on the road take a moment to thank and learn from the ones on our (aging) heels.

Does Depression Have A Function?

It's no secret, there is depression among us.

Asking the question, "How many Americans suffer from depression?" pulls up a plethora of information, articles, research and studies.

It appears that many of us experience a wide range of responses from the blues to severe clinical depression.

A University of Virginia psychiatrist who has been treating patients with depressive disorders for over thirty years believes that depression is an evolutionary paradox.  Sierra Bellows reporting in "The Evolution of Depression" tells us more about Dr. Andy Thomson and his unorthodox ideas.  Excerpt.

"Since the dawn of the species about 200,000 years ago, humans have evolved in response to the environments in which they’ve found themselves. In Northern Europe, lighter skin helped early inhabitants get enough vitamin D during the dark winters. In places in Africa plagued by malaria, many people have a genetic mutation that makes them immune. Like all living things since the first protozoa, the human body has been shaped by natural selection. And evolutionary psychology suggests that the mind has as well. Evolutionary psychologists look for the advantages of different behaviors and mental traits that might cause them to spread through the population.

For more than 30 years, U.Va. psychiatrist Dr. Andy Thomson (Med ’74) has been treating patients, and most often he treats them for depression. Major depressive disorder is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States, and each year clinical depression affects more than 17 million Americans.

Thomson and his collaborator Paul Andrews, now at McMaster University in Canada, believe that depression is an evolutionary paradox. If it didn’t confer any advantages, it should have been selected against and occur only rarely in the population. What kind of evolutionary advantage might depression have?

“Depression, psychic pain, alerts you to the fact that you have a problem, stops business as usual, focuses your attention,and can provide a signaling function that you need help,” says Thomson. “Basically, it forces you to think. Now with all its stressors and the myriad ways of evading them, modern life doesn’t encourage you to think deeply. But thinking deeply works. It’s doing what the mind was made to do.”

Not everyone agrees with the theory.  Some take issue with the premise that depression helps in problem-solving and other executive functions.  Perhaps, as is suggested, we need to reconsider how we define "depression" and not lump everything from "feeling blue" to suffering from chronic suicidal ideations in the same basket. 

You may wish to read on to gauge the full range of professional disagreements and decide for yourself: What use is depression?

Here's my experience: I have learned when enough is enough and I have to step back from the rigors of the world.  I call it time out in the natural world or sitting on the curb to look and listen while the parade marches by.  I have expanded my capacity for empathy, understanding and compassion in the face of enormous daily global suffering encountered in the work I do.  I have developed resilience born of experience.  My mantra is, "Fall down 7 - get up 8."

Maybe the key is this: how we play the hand we are dealt to find something life-affirming in the grimness of a disease, condition or situation we did not ask for.  Here's an example of one man's return After Disaster Strikes.

Q&A Tuesday: What's The Rush?

Q:    What's the rush?

A:    Fill in the answer yourself.

Last week I was in New Orleans. For the year prior I had been working as co-chair of the American Society of Trial Consulants' Annual Conference. The conference was a huge success: more attendance than seen in the past four years, excellent content, and a whole lotta fun that folks can have only in New Orleans.  But I was busy.

What's the rush? 

There were board matters (I am an active member of the board of directors) to attend to, a long and tedious board meeting, speaking on a panel as a stand-in for a member who could not make it, meeting with trial consultant wannabees, making sure things were running well and smoothly, visiting with vendors, huddling with board members and attendees on other organizational issues, and the work that continues long distance while one is away.

What's the rush?

Coming home I was confronted by an article in the NYTimes reporting on high schoolers inhaling Adderall to get the academic edge that would assure them a college seat: Risky Rise of the Good Grade Pill.  Excerpt.

The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.

“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.

At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions."

What's the rush?

What I'm even more concerned about is what happens when these young people get to college.  What will keep them amped up to get good grades then?  And what happens after graduation? 

What's the rush?

A fellow alum from the University of Virginia raised this same question in an article published in the Summer 2012 issue of The University of Virginia magazine, "What's the Rush?"  A mother talking to her 6-month old daughter addresses the personal toll the pressure for success raise when we push the pace of life.  Excerpt.

"Seven years ago, when I was 25, I had a mini breakdown over my lack of accomplishments. I had just completed my master’s program and—gasp—had not written the book I was supposed to write. I had no city to call a home, did not own a house and could not have been more lost or confused. Later I discovered this was so common with my generation, that it was dubbed the “quarterlife crisis.”

The Internet has made it so easy to announce and seemingly measure success that our expectations of how fast we should achieve our goals have become severely skewed.

At the time of my “breakdown” I was living in London working for the U.N. Having this full-fledged panic attack about being a loser in life, I had no idea how many of my peers were having the same doubts.

Our desire for speed has distorted our concept of how fast our life should be moving. If we expect to save the world by the time we are 26, what do we expect of ourselves at 50?

What is even scarier is that many of my peers are actually doing it. Recently I was chatting with my college buddy Bilal Qureshi (Col ’04), who went to U.Va. and Columbia’s school of journalism before becoming a producer at NPR, all by the time he hit 25. We were talking about a friend whose ambitions had caused her to collapse. Her body had literally given up, and she was undergoing tests to find out what was wrong.

It made me think, What is the rush? What are we rushing for? What are we rushing toward?"

At the ASTC Annual Conference I sat in on a program about blogging and social media marketing.  I was reminded AGAIN! to make my content relevant, useful, substantive.  There was no mention of beauty, inspiration, joy, prosperity, life-affirming work, community, and the like.

What's the rush?

As the wise ones say, "Days are long but years are short."

When Is A Barn Not A Barn?

Decorah, Iowa, home to the Decorah Bald Eagles of global Internet fame, is also a place of particularly notable old barns.  Some still fill their traditional purpose.  Others have been re-purposed to hold church meetings and family reunions.

Take a break from whatever it is you are working on and visit with Ceil Miller Bouchet as she takes us on a tour of her home state with its barns that are so much more than a structure built to hold hay and shelter animals: "If These Barns Could Talk."  Excerpt.

"Because I’m a granddaughter of Iowa farmers, I have a soft spot for old barns. Maybe it’s in response to the big sky of the Midwest or the vast expanses of land, but the barns of my home state seem particularly notable. Traditionally the centerpiece of any Iowa farm, these solitary structures always remind me of the labor-filled lives rural families led before agribusiness was even a concept."

 I am not a child of farmers.  But on the wall of my office is a faded photograph of two giggling sisters side-by-side on a wooden seat rope swing hanging from a sturdy tree and in the background an old barn and stacked wood pile.  My sister and I are maybe 5 and 6.  The setting is the old Meserve farm in New Hampshire.  Our father served in the USNavy with the Meserve's son.  We spent a week on their farm during haying season.

To keep us kids from getting in the way we were "banished" to the barn to climb on hay bales, chase chickens that found their way inside, stroke the broad flank of the milking cow that was patiently waiting near the milking pan, and make believe.

My very own make believe will come true one of these fine days when I get my own barn.  I hope you come and visit.  Nature and dreaming are the best rejuvenators.

Advice To Navy Seals In Training - And For The Rest Of Us.

U.S. Navy SEALs (Sea, Air and Land Team) take on the tasks of war focusing on forward operations and combat support.

What I want to know is: How do they endure the grueling mental and physical workouts that weed one brother from another?  Click here to see some photos of U.S. Navy SEALs in training.

Here's a clue: some advice from Joe Maguire (Deputy Commander U.S. Special Operations in Pacific Command-COMPAC) sent to me on April 24th, 2011 when I was ready to call it quits:

"First, never give in to the pressure of the moment.  Whenever you're hurting just hang in there.  Finish the day.  If you're still feeling bad, think about it long and hard before you quit.

Second, take it one day at a time.  One evolution at a time.  Don't let your thoughts run away with you.  Don't start planning to bail out because you're worried about the future and how much you can take.  Don't look ahead to the pain.  Just get through the task and know success is ahead." 

Yes, I'm a U.S. Navy Nurse; but I'm no SEAL.  I'm no SEAL; but I'm still standing.  Taking it one evolution at a time, I fall down 7 and get up 8.

It's Never Too Late To Start Heading In The Right Direction.

What does Beethoven have to do with friendship and compass headings? 

My friend, Stephanie West Allen, sent me a post she wrote in 2002.  It's a wonderful story about the importance of friends who turn us in the right direction.  I call this direction "True North" on my personal compass heading.  I am gravitating toward it with the help of faith, family and friends.

For me, the heart of Allen's blog post is the series of questions she posed which may also be a help to you.  Excerpt.

"Some Questions for You

What gift inside of you is so strong that it must triumph over any adversity (or shyness or inactivity or busy-ness) and  come out for others to enjoy? Are you still holding it in, sapping creative energy by squelching it? What will it take for this ability, this genius, to flow out of you on a stream of inspiration?

We all have our genius with which we can make our world and that of others a more beautiful place. Part of being a member of the brotherhood of man is sharing our gifts with each other. What will bring your tear of joy?

And one more question, who in your life gently turns you around when you are facing in the wrong direction so you can see your standing ovation?"

What are your answers? 

And what other questions does this writing prompt as you turn and head in the direction of your True North?

Suiting Up For The Next Generation.

Saturday last saw me all suited up and talking to upwards of 50 folks who came to The Ecology Center to learn about honey bees (Apis mellifera), pure local honey, and becoming a backyard beekeeper or "beek."

Click here to access the link to the Q&A blog with an observation hive video.

The adults posed many questions showing lots of interest and concern about the plight of honeybees (the canary in the mine of our world), Colony Collapse Disorder, how to distinguish real honey from the store bought fake stuff, and so on.  I felt like I was on "Stump the Beekeeper."

But the real excitement, equally insightful questions and "ah ha!" moments were shared by the young people.  There were eight year old farmer wannabes, ten year old girls taking pages of notes with pencil in spiral bound notebooks so they could prepare for a class report, six year old hands held in the air so long to ask a question that first one arm and then the next and then back to the other were raised.   The teenagers were so engaged they did not text during the hour - well, as far as I could see.

I passed around honeycomb taken from the wild when I rescued swarmed colonies, frames of built-out comb used to raise brood and store honey, frames of old comb where bees had died emerging from their cells, and showed off the beek basics I carry around in my beek box.  The young people were ecstatic when I displayed a photo of lavishly drawn designs painted with wild colors on stacks of hive boxes - no bland white boxes for these kids.  Everybody wanted to get into the act setting up a backyard hive.

Some days despite my Aquarian tendencies I can present a pretty cynical face about the future of the planet.  As I posed for the last cell phone picture and packed up my beek gear I knew that just as we "let bees be bees" the same applies to kids: give them some ideas, support and direction; then let them be as they find their way.  

I believe we are going to be just fine. 

Planting For Future Generations.

I want to plant an orchard.  I want to feed people apples and other wholesome items that come from apple trees.  I am not a young woman.  Somedays I get discouraged that I will ever plant and till my own fields. 

When I confided my uncertainty about my orchard dreams to a wise storyteller friend, she reminded me of one of her favorite "Hodja" stories.

 Nasreddin Hodja is a cultural figure in Turkey. Depending on the story he may be a fool or a philospopher.  What we can say for sure is that each culture has a "Hodja" who is very much like us.

Here is the story she told me:

Planting an Orchard

One day Nasreddin Hodja was planting tree seedlings in a field near his house. His neighbors collected at the edge of the field to watch him work.  They laughed at his efforts.  "Hey! old man, Hodja, why bother?  You are so old you will be dead before even one of these trees bears fruit." The Hodja continued to plant. After a time he straightened his back, looked at the crowd and smiled.  "Yes, what you say may be true.  But I have eaten apples planted by others.  Now it is my time to plant.  I am planting for the next generation."  And he bent back to his work.

So often we can get caught up in making today happen.  Time goes by.  We may sacrifice dreams because they sound foolish, especially as we get older and become less able to see them all the way through to fruition.  But this story reminds me to hold fast to what is important: now is the time to plant.  Plant the dream - for the next generation.

NOTE:

You can also find versions of this story in the following resources:

Gross, Michael. The Fable of the Fig Tree. (New York, NY: Henry Z. Walck, 1975).

MacDonald, Margaret Read. Earth Care: World Folktales to Talk About (North Haven, CT: Linnet Books, 1999). 162pp. $26.50; $17.50pa. ISBN 0-208-02416-6; 0-208-02426-3pa.

Iraq Vet With PTSD Finds Solace In A Film Role.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, has seen its share of wounded military men and women.  Many have war-inflicted wounds you can see.  Many others have something not so easily detected: post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Sgt. Matthew Pennington is one such survivor.  James Dao brings his story to clear relief in his reporting for the NYTimes, "Acting Out War's Inner Wounds."

When I read the article I was reminded of the line by pre-eminent writer Zora Neale Hurston that I have embedded in my email signature line and on which I have written: "There is no greater burden than carrying an untold story."  I believe that what Hurston meant is when we share our stories we find we are very much alike.  I don't know whether the sharing or the reflection of our experience in that of another human being is where the burden lightens; but I can tell you that it does.

“We are lonesome animals.  We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome.  One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the Listener to say - and to feel - ‘Yes! that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.  You are not as alone as you thought.’” [John Steinbeck]

 The story continues:

"For Mr. Pennington, medications seemed to worsen his depression and therapy did not ease his anxiety. He seemed headed for divorce, isolation and perhaps alcoholism. And there his story might have ended, a case study on the intransigence of war’s psychological scars. But it did not end there.

In 2009, an unexpected opportunity landed in his e-mail inbox: a casting call, forwarded by a friend in Nashville, from an undergraduate filmmaker looking for someone to play a combat veteran who had lost a leg, had post-traumatic stress disorder and lived in Maine.

This is my life, Mr. Pennington thought.

So on a lark, Mr. Pennington — whose last appearance on stage was in middle school and who had become nervous in crowds and, indeed, avoided most human contact — decided that fixing his life depended on performing before a camera.

“I thought acting would be so out of the normal that it would force me to deal with things,” he recalled. “I wanted my life back.”

The struggle by wounded veterans like Mr. Pennington to reclaim their lives is the unfolding next chapter in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2001, 46,000 American service members have been injured in combat, perhaps a third or more seriously. Those veterans now face years of rehabilitation at a cost of billions of dollars annually.

In the coming weeks, The New York Times will profile a few of those veterans. Their cases say much about the critical importance of high-quality health care and loving families. But as with Mr. Pennington, they also underscore the individuality of recovery, where the most effective therapies are often discovered by the veterans themselves."

I am not writing a happy ending.  That's not for me to write.  If one is written it will be Pennington's doing.  What strikes me is that yet again the story of who we are, where we've come from, what we've seen, how we have persevered will help all of us get home.

You might wish to click here to watch the story in video form.

Women Who Pursue Their Own Desire. What Dream Is Yours To Capture?

One flew planes and the other swims with sharks.

One died at the age of 90 and the other is 62 with an ocean to cross.

Both are one more reason I gotta say, "We're not here for a long time but a good time."

Betty Haas Pfister was 19 when she paid a dollar at an air show to fly in a plane.  Over the next decades of her life, Pfister made her home in the sky.  Excerpt.

"It was the first of hundreds of flights that Betty Haas Pfister would make — dozens as a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, during World War II, and many more as one of the nation’s most successful female competitive pilots. (And not counting those as a Pan Am stewardess in the days when women had a much harder time getting hired as pilots.)

Ms. Haas Pfister, a two-time winner of the All Women’s International Air Race, died on Nov. 17 at her home in Aspen, Colo., her daughter Suzanne said. She was 90."

Do you know what captivates me most?  Two things: the photograph of Pfister sitting on the nose of her P-39 fighter, and then when WWII was done with her she found her way to live life her way.  Excerpt.

"As one of 1,074 WASPs, Ms. Haas Pfister ferried planes from factories to domestic airfields or to ports for shipment overseas. WASPs also towed targets for aerial gunnery practice. Thirty-eight died in accidents. But by December 1944, with the war winding down, the women were deemed no longer needed and the unit was disbanded.

Ms. Haas Pfister found work as an aircraft mechanic and, very occasionally, flying cargo planes. In 1948, for Pan American, she became the first stewardess ever hired with more than 1,000 hours of flight time. “She got to travel all over the world,” her daughter said. “But she’d rather have been in the cockpit any day of the week.”

Several years earlier, Ms. Haas Pfister had paid $750 for an Army surplus P-39 fighter that she named Galloping Gertie. She flew in dozens of air shows and races around the country, and in 1950 she won the All Women’s International Air Race from Montreal to West Palm Beach, Fla. Two years later, she recaptured that title in a flight from St. Augustine, Fla., to Welland, Ontario."

Closer to ground is another woman who refuses to give up. I blogged about Diana Nyad just as she was getting ready to swim 103 miles of open ocean and then when she called it over. In her story recently told to Elizabeth Weil of the NYTimes, "62 And Life To Go," Nyad is going at it again.  Call her crazy.  Call her determined.  Just don't call her quits.  Excerpt.

 "But as Nyad approached 60, she didn’t feel satisfied; she felt regret. Her 10-year relationship with the woman she calls the love of her life ended in 1994. Four years after that, Nyad sat outside a Los Angeles hospital while that woman had a baby with her new partner, Nyad needing to be there. Nyad’s father died the same year. Her mother died in 2007. Single and childless, she was a romantic without a lover, a striver without a goal. Shouldn’t her existence add up to more? “I wasn’t going to adopt a child, but I knew I needed something of that order,” Nyad said when we met early in November. “Something that would require everything in me. No time for neurotic meanderings about the past, no luxury of that. Got to be my best self.”

So Nyad started swimming again, training for Cuba, hoping to master the crossing that eluded her in her prime. Nyad suddenly seemed happier, secretive, tanned; her friends thought perhaps she had taken a lover. After five months of pool training, Nyad flew to Mexico to test herself in the open water. She did two long swims off Todos Santos — six hours and eight hours. “That’s when I knew I could do it,” Nyad says. “Endurance is not a young person’s game. I thought I might even be better at 60 than I was at 30. You have a body that’s almost as strong, but you have a much better mind.”

My hands are showing their age.  Yet, if it truly is as Nyad says, "Endurance is not a young person's game," then count me in for another life!  We're not here for a long time but a good time.  If you can touch that dream, you can catch it.  What's yours?