One Perfect Day

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“What would constitute a ‘perfect’ day for you?”

Some of you may recognize this as one of “36 Questions That Lead to Love,” a popular and oft-cited article by Daniel Jones in the New York Times in 2015, based on Arthur Aron’s study published in 1997. I could never generate a plausible answer, thinking superficially. And every time I read the article, I think of Nigel Marsh’s description of his ideal day–see 4:50 of his 2011 TED Talk. Basically he spends quality time with family, works about 6 hours, hangs out with friends, exercises, and has sex four times.

Coming across the question again in You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy yesterday, I realized how close to perfect my day off was this week. Here’s how it went, with brackets inserted that would have made it truly ideal:

Wake up after 7 hours of sleep, in a fantastic mood, giddily looking forward to the day.
Move through morning routine easily, no rush or urgency.
Talk to Mei on the way to school, discussing her musings on anything that comes to mind.
Eat a light and tasty breakfast, sweet and salty, carb and protein, and coffee–oh yes, pour over coffee, nice and slow.
Consume a book and/or articles: on audio, digital, and/or print, romance and/or other, in the kitchen and car.

Ethos class! Challenged, educated, strengthened, and energized through coaching and community. I am now quoted on their social media:

Lunch with Dear Friend #1, communing over gorgeous salad, an Arnold Palmer, and shared ideals of leadership, friendship, and inner work.
[Find squishy armchair in a bookstore coffee shop, where I journal my reflections from lunch, reveling in the time and space to meet my friend and feed my soul.]

Browse bookstore, purchase artistic yet understated journal for Dear Friend #2, because everybody deserves pretty paper to write on.
Run into Dear Friend #3 on the way to meet DF2, reconnecting after many months and checking in–yay!
Walk and talk with DF2 [on wooded trails of Summit County–or] near Lake Michigan, stopping to photograph beauty that catches our eyes.
We discuss culture and relational leadership, exchange perspectives, and brainstorm ways to help systems and their people flourish.

[Find a shady bench, near spring blooms and urban wildlife, to sit and journal again, recording ideas, plans, aspirations, BHAGs.]

Pick up Mei from school, she’s energized more than stressed.
Pull fresh ingredients from fridge, audiobook or Agape music in the ears while chopping and stir frying.
Have a light and easy dinner, somebody else cleans up.
Mill around enjoying the house and its memories [it’s clean and neat, all plants watered and thriving].
Complete a relaxed night time routine, including pleasant smelling skin treatments.
More writing [and reading] in bed, all leftover words effused [and/or absorbed] for the day.
Lights out, burrowed in the covers, some intimate connection, sated in all 5 reciprocal domains of health.
Still high the next day and beyond, absolutely buoyed.

So what makes this day so perfect? What makes me so unreasonably and residually happy from it?
The ingredients:
Time
Autonomy
Good sleep
Movement
Communion with people I care about and who care about me
Good food
Alternating rhythm between activity and rest; among input, processing, and output
Nature, especially sunlight
Social, emotional, and intellectual connection, both intra- and inter-.

Would I want to live this day every day? I think not, even if it were possible… Although I could easily imagine repeating it a few times over a languid vacation.

When I cannot/will not get a whole day like this at a time, how can I incorporate something perfect into each day? This question excites me with potential. It wouldn’t take much of any/each of the ingredients above, in any combination, to make any day a little more ideal. Some advance planning, mindfulness, and real time gratitude could go a long, long way. By this time next year, regardless of what’s happening around me that I cannot control, my life in general—all days—could be a lot closer to perfect, even more excellent, than they already are.

Proud of You

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“I bet your mom’s proud of you.”

I sat in the car at the last intersection before entering the parking garage, on a typically cloudy spring morning in Chicago, just another ordinary day of work. A young man crossed the street in front of me: average height and build, light brown hair, clean shaven; neutral expression, walking with intent, apparently familiar with his route, a well-worn work bag slung across his chest–student? Office worker? I can’t say why I noticed him, as he was not the only pedestrian in the area. But as I watched him continue on his way, apparently oblivious to me, I started to wonder: Does your mom know where you are right now? Is she thinking of you? Is she confident that you are safe? I bet she’s proud of you–no matter what you’re doing, whom you’re with, what you will do today–I bet she smiles when she thinks of you.

This was years ago; Son and Daughter were still little kids. My thoughts surprised me, overcame me with something akin to nostalgia over the future? Out of nowhere, my imagination had cast me to sometime close to today, when my own son lives out of state. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing at any given moment, and I do always smile when I think of him. I am proud of him, irrationally (though justifiably) so, just because I’m his mom.

On this day each year we drown in myriad writings, images, and expressions about Motherhood and Mothers’ Love, etc etc, ad nauseum. So let me make my contribution! It’s a complicated ‘holiday’. May you feel respected and validated, however you experience it. Personally I find it ambivalent and a little awkward, like an earned Valentine’s Day and birthday combined. Thank you to Sister for sharing this sardonic piece on the irony of Mother’s Day, and to Ellen over at The Examined Life for sharing this more contemplative perspective on all that women hold.

I think about Son, Daughter, Husband, myself… Of Ozan and Shane, Friend, Friend, Friend, Tribe. I know in some cases, and assume without question in others, that our parents are indeed proud of us. Some of it may stem from what we do–our accomplishments, status, etc. But cultural standards and social norms notwithstanding, I think true parental pride blooms when we see who our children are. Outside the distorting lens of evolutionary drive for progengy survival and intrinsic, self-perpetuating narcissism, who better than our parents see everything about us–our strengths, quirks, triggers, and regrets? Who else witnesses the full panoramic mural of our character, built brick by laborious brick, painted in layers of pigment and divergent media, over our lifetime, starting in our mothers’ wombs? The most fortunate of us benefit from the love and guidance of multiple supportive adults throughout our development. But parents, and moms in particular, hold that special place–that vantage of deep observation and knowledge of the whole of us–or at least the full potential of it.

As usual, when I experience some profound sensation or insight, I feel a need to discharge it. I need to put it somewhere, do something useful with it.

So what about the people for whom I have a hard time imagining proud parents? They are the ones I perceive as uncaring, arrogant, mean, belligerent, and harmful to those around them. How do their moms see them?

Now there’s a fascinating thought experiment. Can I imagine their mom? What does she know that I don’t, how would she respond similarly to and differently from me, witnessing the same behavior in her child? Could she and I, in the best circumstance, help each other understand her child better, more wholly? After all, parents are human; we have biases (see intrinsic narcissism) that blind us to certain realities about our children. It helps us to hear and see outside perspectives, if/when offered in love and compassion.

What makes us say, “…only a mother could love” about someone or something? How cutting and dehumanizing, no? Yikes. We must do better. What tools, frames, mantras, and mindsets can we access, to make more generous assumptions about one another, even/especially about those for whom our default narrative is ‘enemy’ or such? Not much that’s generative or productive emerges when we stand and live in that perspective.

When I see you, talk to you, hear you, experience you, what if I try to take your mother’s best perspective of you, and look harder for her sources of pride in you? Maybe I’ll try this experiment this week. I bet I learn a lot.

Friction, Traction, and Drag

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On our way to any destination, what helps and hinders our progress?

I am currently halfway through reading The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas by Loran Nordgren and David Schonthal, which I recommend. It describes “the four Frictions” that keep us from adopting new ideas or behaviors: Inertia, Effort, Emotion, and Reactance. How fascinating and helpful! It makes sense to think of friction as something that hinders motion and progress, something to be overcome. We consider kinetic energy wasted when friction converts it to heat, and experience real consequences of equipment failure, injury, and stagnation from the burn of chafing contact in motion.

Then again, when is friction desirable? Imagine hiking, mountain climbing, or attempting to traverse any path with the surface covered in a sheet of smooth ice or a thick oil slick. Either we get nowhere, or somewhere we don’t want ‘way too fast. Even for Olympic speed skaters, blade contact with the most pristine ice track still requires some friction–an ideal amount–to gain enough purchase to push against and maintain control.

I submit that in movement of any kind–physical, political, behavioral, emotional, etc–we need optimal friction. Stability requires friction; we depend on it for orientation, to know where we start. Optimal friction coefficient over an ideal surface area provides traction–enough resistance to push against, the stability to launch forward with power. Tire treads, soccer cleats, chalk on a pool cue–we know how to modify objects for maximal traction and performance.

How can we modify our mindsets similarly? What does it cost us to make everything too easy, to remove all friction on the path to achievement? For three years I have exercised in my basement, doing things I know, challenging myself minimally. I have gained strength and maintained confidence in my movements, and also stagnated in my fitness. Joining a fitness community pushes me; I get to reassess my assumptions of capacity and limits. It introduces healthy friction. The tribe here gives me something to test against, strengthening through challenge, elevating my achievement. Additionally, I feel positive peer pressure to eat healthier, a perennial stuggle for me. Communing with folks who care for their bodies with whole foods increases the psychological discomfort (friction?) I feel from eating junk–even when I’m not with them–and voila, my nutrition patterns are changing for the better.

What is the relationship between friction, traction, and drag?

Friction can help or hinder. Traction requries an optimal quantity and distribution of friction for both stability and mobility–I think of it as a kind of potential energy. We understand the concept of traction easily from common vernacular, but what about ‘drag’, other than as late 20th Century social slang? I love the internet, where you can Google, “What is drag in physics” and get it directly from NASA:

“Drag is a mechanical force. It is generated by the interaction and contact of a solid body with a fluid (liquid or gas). It is not generated by a force field, in the sense of a gravitational field or an electromagnetic field, where one object can affect another object without being in physical contact. For drag to be generated, the solid body must be in contact with the fluid. If there is no fluid, there is no drag. Drag is generated by the difference in velocity between the solid object and the fluid. There must be motion between the object and the fluid. If there is no motion, there is no drag. It makes no difference whether the object moves through a static fluid or whether the fluid moves past a static solid object.”

So drag is the resistance of the milieu to movement of an object. It is the cultural current against which innovation swims upstream, a result of the inherent viscosity of any given system. I think of it as another form of friction, but one that only hinders.

If I’m trying to change, to move something, what are the sources of negative friction, positive traction, and drag? Of these, which are modifiable and not? Where and how can I gain a foothold or grip, to push or pull myself onward? Where do I need to apply some lubricant and relieve or release a counterproductive grind? How does the environment need to change, or how can I change my orientation within it, so I may glide more easily toward my goal?

“Drag is generated by the difference in velocity between the solid object and the fluid.” Hmmm. So if I claim my role as change agent, then I must decide how much drag I’m willing and able to tolerate, how much I can afford in cost of fuel for thrust, and what velocity of change will satisfy me. I have to think that my vector matters, also. Head on opposition to a strong and established current, versus a hard left diversion, versus introducing a small fork or bumper in the terrain… I can consider all of these and more, depending on my goals and the ambient conditions.

OH this is such a fun thought experiment! Framing my goals, plans, and actions in terms of friction, traction, and drag allows me to step back from my own tunnel vision, to see a complex adaptive system perhaps more concretely and objectively, even dispassionately. Whether it’s my own personal health habits or the professional culture of medicine, this analogy feels helpful. I wonder how it will continue to manifest hereafter?