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Infinite Baseball

It takes however long it takes

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After his death, Stephen Jay Gould, the great paleontologist and scholar of evolutionary history, was still teaching about a subject he loved—through a posthumous book of essays about baseball. Gould and other famous scholars and writers—individuals such as historians David Halberstam and Doris Kearns Goodwin, novelist John Updike, financial journalist Michael Lewis, and New Yorker essayist Roger Angell—have all written with a special affinity for the game. Ken Burns found many of them for his 9-part PBS documentary Baseball. Yes, even poet Walt Whitman wrote about baseball in the mid-nineteenth century.

I’m here to report that we have a candidate for the 2019 addition to the “smart people write about baseball” library. Let’s see what it might tell us about baseball, and life.

Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark is a short and entertaining work written by Alva Noë, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a lifelong New York Mets fan. I went against my standing policy of rejecting books with jacket blurbs by George Will and took a flyer on this set of 33 essays, most of them repurposed from National Public Radio’s discontinued science blog 13:7:Cosmos and Culture.

Noë’s reflections from a lifetime of observing and thinking about baseball has led him to a number of thoughtful, not-always-convincing, but generally smart and witty opinions about the game. That’s no surprise. If there is a thread running through Infinite Baseball, it is that the on-field chatter and off-field debate are part and parcel of the same “practice.” The “limits of the game are not drawn, in any straightforward sense, around the field of play itself.” As a thinking exercise, one that “demands of its players that they seek, in their role as players, to fathom and articulate the game,” then thoughtful writing is baseball as well.

Scorebook
My personal story of the clinching game when the Washington Nationals won their first National League East Division championship.

This contention is best seen in Noë’s four essays of the importance of “scoring” a game. As one who takes an old-fashioned scorebook to the game, I was intrigued by his takes on the importance of scoring as key to the “forensic” nature of baseball as well as to the stories that make the game great. On the first point, Noë argues that keeping score is not just a look at what happened, but “sourcing praise and blame and interpreting the significance of what’s going on.” The outcome isn’t always as important as knowing who is responsible for what happens.

The forensic nature of the game makes more sense when tied to the realm of stories. Baseball, in Noë’s view, is “remarkably focused on not just storytelling, but also on finding ways to write the story down, very literally, on the scorecard. Baseball is, in this sense, historical and history making.”* I am a firm believer in the importance of figuring out the stories that help explain who we are and why we exist. We approach life best when we seek to fathom and articulate what it means to be alive.**

Noë puts forward challenging and intriguing points-of-view on topics that every fan would understand. For instance:

  • Performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), in Noë’s view, are not “cheating,” but should be seen as similar to having Tommy John surgery to prolong one’s pitching career through medical technology. He argues that if we monitored PEDs as we do surgery, the risk would not be as great for the players. Noë also suggests that alleged PED-using home run king Barry Bonds clearly belongs in the Hall of Fame, just as the Atlanta Braves’ John Smoltz became the first pitcher to enter the Hall following Tommy John surgery. Without the surgery, Smoltz would not have had a Hall of Fame career. Whether you agree or not, it does force one to reconsider the conflict we have about our nature as human beings.
  • Baseball is boring in part because you need the slowness to do all the thinking that’s required to play and understand the game well. Attempts to speed up play fundamentally attack the core of the game. On this point, Noë and I are in complete agreement. “A baseball game, like a good conversation, or a friendship, or a political controversy,” he notes, “has no fixed end. It takes however long it takes.” (Emphasis added.) In response to the commissioner’s push to speed up the game, Noë’s take is, “God save us from today’s ramped-up, fast-paced world! We need to slow down. We need to turn off. We need to unplug. We need to start things and not know when they are going to end. We need evenings at the ballpark, evenings spent out of time.”
  • While baseball is clearly a game full of statistics, it is almost impossible to compare players from different time periods (as many traditionalists like to do). All sorts of changes to the game had impacts that are almost never taken into account—from the 1920s introduction of new balls when the one in use gets scuffed (resulting immediately in more home runs by a player named Babe Ruth), to the integration of baseball in the 1950s (vastly improving the competition and level of play when individuals such as Willie Mays became big league ballplayers), to lowering the height of the pitching mound in 1969 (which benefitted the hitters who couldn’t touch Bob Gibson in 1968 as he hurled from the mound that was a full five inches higher). Noë isn’t arguing against cross-period comparisons, but he is making the point that in baseball—as in life—numbers never tell the whole story of human achievement. As you might expect, he is not a fan of the total immersion of sabermetrics into the game. While not dismissing the value of the new analytical tools, Noë adds, “Want to know what happened on the field? You’d better take a look, and give it some thought.”

Noë delves more deeply into the “cliché that baseball is a microcosm of life” by suggesting that the game is a social world and “exhibits the structural properties of social worlds.” It isn’t just the men on the diamond, but it is also the practice of trying to understand what the men on the diamond are doing “not only while they are doing it but also in the larger setting of the game’s past and future.” You need not only the players, umpires, coaches, and fans to engage with the game, but also to reflect on what happens, as we do in life. The best example is in the chapter, “No-hitters, Perfect Games, and the Meaning of Life.”

A no-hitter is special “because in baseball, as in life, we sometimes care less about what happens—who’s actually winning or losing—than about who is accountable.” (You can pitch a no-hitter and lose the game because of walks, errors, passed balls, hit batsmen, etc.) A perfect game, on the other hand, “is special because sometimes we are primarily about the outcomes.” No-hitters are primarily a pitcher’s accomplishment, while a perfect game is always a team accomplishment. Life is like that, in that we are always thinking about “what we do and what matters.”

You find this fan’s enthusiasm, leavened by the philosopher’s wit, throughout Infinite Baseball. There are plenty of gems to open your eyes and mind to new ways of looking at this endlessly fascinating game.

With two games at Nationals Park over this current homestand, I’m seeing a great week taking shape, no matter what else happens.

More to come…

DJB

Image: “Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark” by Alva Noe

*On this point, Noë is supported by none other than the esteemed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who regularly tells audiences that she learned to score Brooklyn Dodger games (then played in the afternoon) so that she could sit with her father each evening and retell the game while he relaxed after work. She said the storytelling sharpened her work as a historian. I heard this first-hand as my daughter and I were getting Goodwin’s autograph on Team of Rivals and I happened to mention that Claire was learning how to score baseball. Goodwin stopped, put down her pen, and talked with us for over a minute—holding up a long line—about the importance of that practice in her life. Claire, I should mention, is now an Oakland A’s fan, who attends multiple games with friends each season.

**My son Andrew and I experienced the importance of stories—both within and outside the game—in the baseball context last month. A game we attended at Nationals Park was delayed almost two hours by an unexpected thunderstorm. In spite of the inconvenience, we spent a delightful evening talking, over beers and popcorn, with two women—both season ticket holders—who easily topped 80 years of age. We spoke extensively about baseball, of course, but we also touched on everything from opera (they were interested as to why Andrew went to study in London) to talking parrots (one of the women had one, and she was amazed that he didn’t swear like a sailor, since that was her favorite method of communication). Fascinating, and definitely an evening spent out of time.

Wonder

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Imagine living 99 years inspired by a sense of wonder.

Entering into the world as children, we began with the curiosity and amazement found at the heart of a wonder-filled life. Yet along our journeys, most step out of this sense of wonderment and instead become cautious, cynical, hardened, haughty or any number of other traits designed to protect our egos and allow us to function—or so we believe—in the adult world.

In taking that step, we too often lose a generous, more imaginative perspective.

Wonder came into my consciousness last week while I was in Charlottesville for the memorial service of a long-time friend, Anne Worrell. I met Anne soon after moving to Virginia in the early 1980s, and over the years I came to know her primarily as a historic preservationist, businesswoman, newspaper publisher, philanthropist, and convener extraordinaire. With her husband Gene she founded their first newspaper, the Virginia Tennessean, in Bristol, and together they grew the company to be one of the largest chains of small dailies in the country.

Anne, who passed away on August 1st at the age of 99, was an indispensable early supporter of the effort to save Thomas Jefferson’s retreat, Poplar Forest, and we served together on that board for a number of years. Anne was a trustee of the Preservation Alliance of Virginia, where I was the founding director; providing the organization with critical guidance and funding to tell the story of preservation’s economic impact in the Commonwealth, an effort which led to the highly successful state historic rehabilitation tax credits. And because of Anne’s ability to convene, each election cycle found all the candidates for governor, no matter their political party, in her office to discuss preservation policy. Anne was also generous in spirit, once offering us her house in Abingdon for an overnight stay when she learned we were planning a 12-hour drive to Tennessee with six-month-old twins. Anne was certainly a welcomed force in my world.

At the memorial service, her granddaughter spoke of the personal side of Anne’s life. I immediately recognized my friend when she described her grandmother as animated by a simple sense of wonder. “That’s wonderful!”—always spoken with exuberance and a smile—was one of Anne’s favorite phrases. We heard it often. Her family told stories about Anne’s writing for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, with a special focus on a trilogy of books featuring a pair of wrens that took up residence near her house. Living in a sense of wonder didn’t make Anne a Pollyanna. True to the early masters of the fairy tale genre, Anne wrote about the world as a difficult place; a place where a snake could come into the wren’s birdhouse and eat the eggs while the parents were gone. Yet amazingly, Mr. and Mrs. Wren always came back, working to build a better home and a better life. Anne conveyed life lessons built on her own experiences, for sure, but also based on her indomitable sense of wonder.

Author Richard Holmes has challenged the rigidity of current perspectives and boundaries between disciplines and ideologies, calling instead for a culture with a “sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.” Anne possessed those qualities in abundance, often expressing herself through a sense of humor full of empathy and wisdom.

Anne’s life, along with considerations on the ways in which a broader sense of wonder could impact the world we live in, were on my mind the next day when I entered Takoma Bev. Co. for our standard Saturday morning family brunch. I was delighted to see our favorite employee at work, an outgoing and articulate young man who confronts each task with a smile and who even cleans up floor spills with unbridled exuberance. We began talking and—after seeing him and chatting briefly over several weeks—finally used this occasion to ask his name. “Wonder” he responded, “it means ‘last born’ in Ewe, and I was the last of seven children in my family.”

Once again, I was reminded to be present when serendipity strikes.

This Wonder is certainly old enough to have slipped the bonds of amazement and move to the more cynical traits we so often call upon as adults. But instead, he was choosing to live out the broader understanding of the meaning of his name with a generous and imaginative perspective.

How we see the world about us is a choice to be made. We can change our perspectives, if we desire, with enough time and work. In considering how best to respond to the challenges of our times, I believe we would all benefit by gathering a simple sense of wonder to support a generous heart and an imaginative view of our life on this stage.

Rest in peace, Anne Worrell. Your sense of wonder still has a place in the world. Even in our local coffee shop.

More to come…

DJB

Installment #9 of The Gap Year Chronicles

Image of water lily by Couleur from Pixabay.

Toni Morrison, R.I.P.

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Toni Morrison movie poster

“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” movie poster

Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning author and arguably our First Lady of Letters, passed away last evening, August 5th, at the age of 88.

She left this earth as a new book of essays, The Source of Self-Regard, along with a recently released documentary entitled Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, introduced long-time fans and new readers alike to her towering intellect and broad vision. These works could not have come along at a better time.

Now that she has died, we will have to rely on the power of Morrison’s words; the clarity of her vision for social justice; the love of art, music, and literature that permeates the meditations in The Source of Self-Regard and the interviews in The Pieces I Am more than ever.

At the end of “Peril,” the very first offering in The Source of Self-Regard, Morrison makes the bold statement that, “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.” And through 350 pages of speeches, essays, and meditations, she shows why.

There are 43 pieces in The Source of Self-Regard, and they cover a range of topics that are all timely in an age of disinformation, fake news, and a willing disregard for the power of language to bring empathy and healing. Speaking of the limitations of rage in an address delivered to Amnesty International entitled “The War on Error,” Morrison writes,

“Rage has limited uses and serious flaws. It cuts off reason and displaces constructive action with mindless theatre. Besides, absorbing the lies, untruths, both transparent and nuanced, of governments, their hypocrisy so polished it does not even care if it is revealed, can lead to a wearied and raveled mind.

We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy. Where the body of civil liberties, won cell by cell, bone by bone, by the brave and the dead withers in the searing heat of ‘all war, all the time,’ and, where facing eternal war, respect for, even interest in, humanitarian solutions can dwindle.”

In a beautiful eulogy to James Baldwin, Morrison wrote that the author “made American English honest — genuinely international….You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity; in place of soft, plump lies was a lean, targeted power….You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance.”

The same could be said of Morrison.

Both the book and film give us a chance to see a wise mind at work. In the documentary, the most illuminating insights come when Morrison is talking directly into the camera. In several of the essays she touches on the process she went through in writing her novels. It is fascinating reading for anyone who cares about how writing becomes wisdom. In reference to the writing of Beloved, the Nobel Laureate notes that her work with the historical books of slavery led her into a trap of confusing data with information and knowledge with hunches, so much so that overcoming her arrogance about how much she knew was her first obstacle.

“What I needed was imagination to shore up the facts, the data, and not be overwhelmed by them. Imagination that personalized information, made it intimate, but didn’t offer itself as a substitute. If imagination could be depended on for that, then there was a possibility of knowledge. Wisdom, of course, I would leave alone, and rely on the readers to produce that.”

Relying on her readers as active participants in her writing reflects the sentiments put forth by author Rebecca Solnit, who once said, “The object we call a book is not the real book, but its seed or potential, like a music score. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the seed germinates, the symphony resounds. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.” In a perceptive essay entitled, “Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading,” Morrison points to the fact that the text and the reader have another party involved in interpretation — the author.

“What I could not clearly articulate (in an earlier essay) was the way in which a reader participates in the text — not how she interprets it, but how she helps to write it. (Very much like singing: there are the lyrics, the score, and then the performance — which is the individual’s contribution to the piece.)

Invisible ink is what lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden until the right reader discovers it….The reader who is ‘made for’ the book is the one attuned to the invisible ink….

Withdrawing metaphor and simile is just as important as choosing them. Leading sentences can be written to contain buried information that completes, invades, or manipulates the reading. The unwritten is as significant as the written. And the gaps that are deliberate, and deliberately seductive, when filled by the ‘right’ reader, produce the text in its entirety and attest to its living life. . . .

Clearly, the opening sentence of Paradise is a blatant example of invisible ink. ‘They shot the white girl first, and then took their time with the rest.'”

There is so much to stimulate and challenge the reader in both this masterful book and the timely documentary. The sweeping search for truth is formidable and worth the effort. Because, as Morrison notes in her meditation on memory,

“…the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”

Toni Morrison, rest in peace.

More to come…

DJB

Lincoln Douglas Debate

The search for wise leaders

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Is it possible to find wise leaders in this era dominated by 30-second soundbites, cable news demands for conflict, twitter-length pronouncements that take the place of rational discourse, and increasingly short — or nonexistent — attention spans?

I began thinking anew about wisdom after hearing The Rev. Emily Griffin speak a few weeks ago on how those who are wise stay afloat in a figurative sea of rising waters. Those thoughts were carried forward in one new book that has been on my nightstand, along with another I’ve returned to in recent months. Both included perspectives on wisdom, insight, and discernment. Making the link between wisdom and leadership followed later as — with increasing frustration — I watched two nights of the Democratic presidential debates on CNN at the end of July.

First, consider how we know that someone is wise. The writers I have been reading suggest that wisdom includes meaningful self-knowledge as well as an important outward-facing impact.

Defining wisdom as “knowledge translated into action,” Emily struck a chord and helped begin my walk down this path. We all know people who are full of information and who have an answer for everything. But are these people wise? Emily’s thoughts about the fruit of wisdom being in the “works of our hands” suggest perhaps not:

“. . . wisdom is less about mastering floods of information; it’s more about riding the waves so they don’t drown or paralyze us. . . . Wisdom is what helps us to set direction and move together to get there.

But it’s not all about knowing the terrain in advance. Wisdom also helps us to handle new situations that we’ve neither predicted nor prepared for. . . . Wisdom isn’t about intellectual feats of strength; it has to do with what we learn from our elders and from our own experience — and how that comes out in the works of our hands, in the ways we treat each other, in our capacity to respond with calm and grace when anger and judgment are so much easier.”

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, in a 1992 lecture entitled The Source of Self-Regard, speaks to the confusion between information and wisdom:

“In all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see… that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.”

In her 2016 book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living,  Krista Tippett also speaks to the idea of translating knowledge into action. She notes that one of the qualities of wisdom “is about joining inner life with our outer presence in the world. The litmus test of wisdom is the imprint it makes on the world around it.”

I have certainly known individuals who take the wisdom of their inner life and use it to shape a better world. I suspect you do as well. As we are facing critical decisions about what type of country we expect to be, however, our political and media culture seem hard-pressed to develop and sustain a process to help us choose a wise leader.

When Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen A. Douglas debated in 1858, largely on the question of expansion of slavery into the territories, one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a 30-minute rejoinder. The candidates alternated speaking first. Although Lincoln lost that race in the legislature (after winning a plurality of the votes), his fame rose because of the wisdom that came through the coverage of the original debates and a publication of the texts from those events. In the 1860 presidential election that mattered, the people clearly had some sense of the wisdom that could lead the country through its most existential crisis to date.

However, facing another crisis of our democracy, we’ve had four “debates” that asked for 60-, 30-, and 15-second responses (and a “show of hands” in the first set of  debates) to complicated questions that will not be decided in less than two minutes. Critical issues, such as Russia’s attacks on our democracy and the response of American enablers to those attacks, were not even covered. Instead, what we saw was politics as reality TV. James Poniewozik, the New York Times media critic, noted that “Each night of the debate began with a hyperdramatic clip reel suited to an ‘Amazing Race’ finale, giving candidates thumbnail descriptions and setting up the night’s story arcs.”

We elected one unqualified reality TV star by not taking wisdom seriously. A key question going forward is, can we get past the idea that politics is a reality show? Hank Stuever, the Washington Post TV critic, answers with, “Not if CNN has anything to do with it.”*

“CNN’s format facilitated a frenetic game of human darts, with questions designed to goad the jabbing. It was a never-ending two-night competition of lightning rounds, in 30- and 15-second rebuttals to one-minute answers. . . . (It) never quite achieved the mood of actual discourse.

Instead, we were watching CNN make television — pieces and bites and clips of which it can repurpose into more programming fodder . . .”

I suspect that there are candidates for president (and many other offices across the country) who have the ability to be wise leaders, to help us “handle new situations that we’ve neither predicted nor prepared for.” But will we demand that our political parties and the media give us the opportunity to find them? In the press for a new type of political coverage, I believe we have to support those conversations and forums that give us the chance to weigh, over time, the wisdom of the candidates. Conversely, we have to take our eyes and ears away from those platforms that simply want to turn our politics into another version of The Bachelorette. Unfortunately, we find it hard to devote the time, focus, and energy to dig deep into the reality behind the campaign and media marketing. It is so much easier to jump to websites and click on stories with headlines that reinforce our beliefs but don’t tell us anything of substance. We have information but not knowledge or wisdom.

One final, and perhaps hopeful note: the text Emily uses from the Book of Proverbs, found in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, defines Wisdom as a “she” who exists at the dawn of creation. That helps us, as Emily notes, to “sense the fullness of what it means to be created in the image of God.” No endorsements here . . . just something to think about in interesting times.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

*Stuever also had an insightful comment about the misuse of the beautiful and historic Fox Theatre in Detroit, a resplendent space that I’ve been privileged to visit. He noted: “Even the set for the debate in Detroit’s Fox Theatre, which CNN boasts took 100 people eight days to build (using 25 cameras, 500-plus lights and 40,000 pounds of equipment), seemed like a vulgar example of what we’ve turned our politics into. It overwhelmed the sturdy and ornate authenticity of the palatial 5,000-seat theater, which was constructed in 1928 and built to last. CNN’s frantic impermanence insulted the structure’s beauty.” I would add, that impermanence also insulted our wisdom.

Image: Lincoln Douglas Debates commemorative stamp from 1958 (Credit: U.S. Government, Post Office Department – U.S. Post Office Hi-res scan of postage stamp by Gwillhickers., Public Domain)

The 2019 NFL season begins anew. Heaven help us.

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Late yesterday afternoon I was watching a bit of ESPN. Suddenly, the excitement level of the announcers’ voices rose significantly as they began talking about “THE FIRST NFL PRE-SEASON GAME OF THE YEAR” scheduled for later that evening. On August 1st.

Doesn’t this thing ever go away? Heaven help us.

We’re in the midst of a baseball pennant race where, with two months to go, 17 teams are either division leaders or within four games of the two wild-card slots in each league and thus have a legitimate chance at making the playoffs. Teams are going on improbable streaks (I’m looking at you, New York Mets and San Francisco Giants). Strong teams (Houston) just made themselves better with deadline trades, while other teams (New York Yankees and Washington Nationals) left their fans disappointed by their lack of imagination and just plain guts in filling in their weaknesses.

Suffice it to say, there’s a lot to watch (and talk about) around baseball.

But noooo. We have to hear about pro football ad infinitum. Well, I’m (still) sick of it.

Over the past four years I’ve posted four Super Bowl rants to give you my take on what’s wrong with this $10 billion nonprofit (seriously). I started after Super Bowl 48, and continued with Super Bowl Rants II, III, and IV. To spare you from having to read all the reasons in detail, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version of what’s wrong with today’s NFL*:

  • Those stupid Roman numerals. How pretentious can any sport be that lists its championship game by Roman numerals?
  • The NFL is a non-profit. (No, seriously.)
  • The militarization of football by FOX. I would prefer to watch my sports without being shown countless patriotic scenes, troops in Afghanistan, more renditions of God Bless America than anyone should have to listen to in a lifetime (are you paying attention Major League Baseball?), military flyovers for everything from preseason games to Super Bowls, and so much more. Enough already! It’s a damn game, not some statement on the American psyche and national manhood. (Sorry. I went off on that one a little bit.)
  • Concussions. 2015’s Super Bowl (#49) was hailed by many as the “best Super Bowl ever.” What did it feature? One confirmed concussion, and one probable concussion that the Patriots covered up. (The Onion had a telling headline: Super Bowl Confetti Made Entirely From Shredded Concussion Studies.) A horrendous arm injury by one player. Oh, and a fight in the end zone on the next to last play. Yep, that about sums up the NFL these days. (Sorry again. I also have a personal thing about concussions.)
  • It’s the damn Patriots. Again. These guys always seem to find their way back to the Super Bowl. Is there anyone more insufferable in sports than Bill Belichick/Tom Brady? (Wait, I’ll answer that. Maybe Coach K. But that’s another post. And I know that Belichick and Brady are actually two people, but I’ve grouped them as one because they synch their grating to perfection.)**
  •  And finally, the easiest reason of all not to watch the NFL: Daniel Snyder.

Okay. Just had to get that off my chest. Suffice it to say, I did not watch the NFL “Hall of Fame” preseason kickoff game last evening (where, as one announcer put it, “no one good will be allowed on the field”) and I won’t watch whatever Super Bowl comes around in February.

Take your family, friends, and loved ones to the ballpark. Buy them some peanuts and Cracker Jacks (and perhaps a local IPA and a “half smoke all the way” from Ben’s Chili Bowl if you are at Nationals Park.) Relax. Its summer, and that means its baseball season.

More to come…

DJB

*I’ve provided 14 specific reasons if you want to go down this rabbit hole with me. Just click on the links.

**I have a good friend from Boston who taught at the school Belichick attended, and this reason always gives him heartburn. He calls the Patriots his “dirty little pleasure.” Other than this slight character flaw, my friend is a terrific guy.

Image: NFL Brain Diagram via SportsPickle.com

Discipline

Discipline

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An acquaintance who overcame addiction to remake her life once told me, “Discipline is remembering what you really want.”

So much of what we accomplish comes back to having the discipline to achieve our goals. After years of giving in to dependency, my friend wanted to change her life in a way that aligned with her goals; with what she — when she was brutally honest with herself — really wanted from life.*

As a different person than I was in my 20s or 40s, I’m now focusing on what I really want to accomplish in the years ahead. Discipline is hard and involves pain, no matter where you are in your life journey: in school, beginning a career, as a senior manager, building and growing a business, caring for others, living out a gap year, sailing along effortlessly, or fighting addiction. However, it has been said, “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.”

To be effective, discipline requires daily care and attention. Deciding how to prioritize what you really want is an important first, and ongoing, step. Investor Warren Buffett is famous for, among other things, his 3-step approach to setting priorities. To boil his approach down to the basics:

  • Step 1 — List your top 25 goals
  • Step 2 — Circle the top 5
  • Step 3 — Focus like a laser on the top 5 and avoid the other 20 at all costs

Eliminating the inessential, the things that are not what you really want, is so important in life. Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision-making, but they’re not. They’re habits. They don’t come from our core goals or from a place of discipline; instead, they come as our brains look for ways to save effort. Fortunately, as Charles Duhigg writes in The Power of Habit: Why we Do What We Do in Life and Business, habits are not destiny.

How do we focus on key goals that are clear and compelling to drive choices and actions over hours, days, months, and years? As my daily routine has changed dramatically over the last three months, I’ve seen the need to focus on what I do out of habit and what I do that comes from a disciplined approach to life and my goals. I am working to change those habits where a more disciplined approach is needed. This assessment is a necessary task that needs to take place on a regular basis. If we don’t make that commitment, we will have to face the consequences of our actions.

Discipline isn’t simply making a box and staying within those boundaries. In so many areas of exploration and growth, lines are made to be crossed. Instead, discipline is having your big picture goal — remembering what you really want — always front of mind and part of your daily practice.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

*The line was so important to me that I used it to lead off my 60 Lessons from 60 Years post of a few years ago.

Installment #8 of The Gap Year Chronicles

A Human Touch

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I first saw Jackson Browne in the 1970s. Today, at 70 years of age, he is still writing and singing some of the most beautiful and heartfelt music around.

A Human Touch, featured in this Saturday Soundtrack, is among his most moving.

5B poster
Movie poster for the documentary 5B

Written with Steve McEwan and Leslie Mendelson for the Paul Haggis documentary 5B, the song captures the compassion of the caregivers in the 1980s in San Francisco General’s Ward 5B, the world’s first AIDS ward unit. The video of the beautiful Browne / Mendelson duet includes footage of how courage and compassion changed the way doctors and nurses approached and treated AIDS as the epidemic spread fear and hatred throughout the world.

“You can call it a decision
I say it’s how we’re made
There’s no point in shouting from your island
Proclaiming only Jesus saves
There will always be suffering
And there will always be pain
But because of it there’ll always be love
And love, we know, it will remain

Everybody gets lonely
Feel like it’s all too much
Reaching out for some connections
Or maybe just their own reflection
Not everybody finds it
Not like the two of us
Sometimes all anybody needs
Is a human touch”

Beautiful and timely in this age of renewed fear and hatred. There will always be love.

More to come…

DJB

Image by James Chan on Pixabay

The Moon

The start of a good idea

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“The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.”

The line — an unanticipated gift near the end of the 2018 Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk — is simple on its face yet it captures so much of the spirit that is needed today in America. This look towards collaboration also seems appropriate as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.

Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space and later the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), heard the “start of a good idea” line once and it stayed with her. The message she took from it was that exchanges of information from “odd groups, outsiders to the program under study,” were how people learn, adapt, and build exciting new tools and programs to serve humankind. Individuals seldom add value when they come into those conversations with strong agendas built on furthering their professional practice, a rigid ideology, or personal greed.

In Lewis’s telling of Sullivan’s work at NOAA, weather forecasters and the scientists at the National Weather Service are among the stars. As gifted a storyteller as exists in America today, Lewis makes the case that the 2016 election brought an ideological worldview to power that did not want to understand the government, the vital services it provides, and the risks inherent in ignoring very serious issues that affect the life, health, and safety of hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of citizens around the world. Things like nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. Food safety. Rural water and sewage plants. Accurate weather forecasting.

All involve the need to work together, as Sullivan suggests, to manage risks, build new tools to address current challenges, and serve humankind.

Willful ignorance and greed play an important role in this worldview that has come into power and brought increased risk into key elements of American life.

“If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.” (emphasis added)

Many of the tasks government takes on for us are not very sexy and have proven to be of little interest to the private sector that wants to make money, quickly. But, as demonstrated time and again, these tasks need the attention of our best and brightest, working collaboratively to solve critical challenges. Government “steps in where private investment fears to tread, innovates and creates knowledge, (and) assesses extreme long-term risk.” This role conflicts with the worldview of those in power, however. Problems arise out of this conflict, such as when the private sector and its enablers in government begin to believe that “people who wanted a weather forecast should have to pay for it” through a private company.* Lewis asks his readers to consider the audacity of the proposals to move all public weather predictions to the private sector.

“A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.”

Lewis believes the rift in American life “that is now coursing through American government isn’t between Democrats and Republicans,” but “between the people who are in it for the mission, and the people who are in it for the money.”

The absolute necessity of our need to nurture and maintain the social compact for a country built on ideas and ideals is among my core beliefs. Yet Lewis is showing, as others have before him, how decisions made for short-term gain are ripping that social compact apart. One of the best works on the topic is George Packer’s 2013 book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. The bottom line of Packer’s compelling work: we’ve left the social compact — the caring for others that once defined America and helped build the world’s most productive middle class — in order to chase individual greed and power. The monied interests and their helpers in government have forgotten about “We the People” and instead have focused on “I, Me, Mine.”

Without a focus on the community, with the involvement of our fellow travelers, the most we’ll ever have individually is the start of a good idea. The government — so long attacked by monied interests who seek short term gain — is the mission of society. Society — that community of “odd” interests — has to work together if our start of a good idea is to grow to fruition.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

*The proposal that the government not be allowed to issue weather forecasts was included in a piece of legislation once introduced by then-Senator Rick Santorum on behalf of the Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather company.

Image of the moon credit space.com

American exceptionalism

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NOTE: This post was changed for some unknown reason by WordPress after it was posted. In its original form, it was a much more serious post, but much of that language was lost. I’ve tried to make sense of what they left, but have had to make it much more trivial and apologize for the loss of the original post.

The term “American exceptionalism” has been bandied about by politicians, pundits, historians, and others with increasing frequency. Attempting to catch up on the latest atrocities against democracy and the rule of law, I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about the term: how it was used throughout history and how it has become weaponized in our divided political culture.

The phrase may have originated in the 1830s with the first great observer of American life, the French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, but the meaning has changed over time.

We clearly are not exceptional. It doesn’t take too much to see that. Try looking at, for instance:

America as “the best” in everything we do is a naïve belief that is easy to debunk. But the concept of American exceptionalism that does require serious consideration is constructed on the idea that we created something new in 1776 out of whole cloth; a “new history” if you will. And moral superiority is a key part of the argument that this new nation, with its unique commitment to freedom and democracy, is exceptional.

Any serious reading of history will tell us that this simply isn’t true. We need to understand our history if we are to begin to help America live up to its exceptional ideals.

More to come…

DJB

* Not to mention the good systems in the U.K., Italy, and so many other countries.

**I guess this does prove that we are exceptional in some things.

Image: Uncle Sam at the Takoma Park July 4th parade

Thinking, Fast and Slow

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(NOTE: I first posted this short review of Daniel Kahneman’s monumental book on how we think and the ways in which our minds work on December 1, 2013, as part of an essay on several recently-completed books. Since then I’ve wanted to link to this specific review on multiple occasions. To make that easier, I’m pulling it out and reposting it here alone. I learn so much every time I open Kahneman’s work. As I said in the initial review, “Just read the book — you’ll thank me for it later.”)

"Thinking, Fast and Slow"

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In the late summer/early fall, I began this amazing 2011 book by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow takes Kahneman’s groundbreaking research over several decades and brings it together in this tour of how our minds work.

There is so much here to absorb that it is impossible to do this book justice in a couple of paragraphs. Kahneman begins by explaining our two systems for thinking — one fast, highly intuitive, and emotional, and the other slower and more logical. Of course we use the first system for most of our decisions, and Kahneman demonstrates again and again how our unwillingness to push ourselves to the more systematic — but harder — system of thinking drives bad decisions. As just one example, he shows how when faced with a difficult question, we’ll often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Yet another section of the book explores “our confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.” In example after example and test after test, Kahneman explores this facet of the human condition.

There is so much here to challenge what you think you know. As the New York Times book review said, “It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching….”

Just read the book – you’ll thank me for it later.

More to come…

DJB

Photo by Anthony Tori on Unsplash