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Memory, continuity, and identity

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While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Where the journey begins — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on June 29, 2020.

As I was preparing to give a talk to a preservation planning seminar at the University of Virginia late last month, I took the time to reread Why Old Places Matter: How historic places affect our identity and well-being by my long-time friend and former colleague Thompson M. (Tom) Mayes. I returned to Tom’s book because it is a great place to consider and understand the variety of factors that come into play as we save old places.

A key reason for me is that old places help us feel that we belong.

In writing the 14 essays in Why Old Places Matter, Tom spent time on some of the more practical motivations and outcomes, such as sustainability, economics, and community. But the ideas that most intrigued him, and that seemed to get to the heart of why these places seem to matter so much to people, were captured in a cluster of the essays that were about memory, continuity, and identity. These ideas are fundamental.

Memory. Old places help tell our stories.

Continuity. Old places give us a chance to feel a connection to the broad community of human experience, a community that exists across time.

Identity. Old places help us understand that our lives are not insignificant — that what we do will have an impact on the future.

Memory, continuity, and identity are deeply important to people, positioning the importance of old places in people’s lives in a much more fundamental fashion than the ways in which we often talk about the past and in the way we design our preservation laws. It was that point of view that I wanted to share with the students. As I did so, I placed it in the context of my personal journey and the stories that matter to me. Such as my origin story, which takes place at Union Station in Nashville.

Union Station is a Nashville landmark. As one approaches on Broadway, it looms alone on the landscape, like Mount Monadnock or a butte in Monument Valley. It is a beautiful old pile of a building in what is known as the Romanesque Revival style. The lobby is designed to showcase the power and opulence of the railroads at the turn-of-the-twentieth century.

The building’s history as a key Louisville & Nashville Railroad station is worth remembering. Its architectural and decorative features add to what makes it important. Yet all of that wasn’t enough. By the early 1980s, the building was threatened with demolition. Abandoned and deteriorating, Union Station was just another eyesore from a bygone era.

Places with imposing presence, with designs built for the ages, places that once served noble purposes, are — from my perspective — worth the effort to find a new use in today’s world. But for some, what is seen as the push for progress is worth the loss of the buildings and landscapes that provide continuity with the past. No, Union Station wasn’t going to be saved because of its railroad history and grand architecture alone. It became a landmark in so many minds — providing the motivation behind the effort to save it from the wrecking ball — because of the building’s innumerable, varied, and deeply personal connections to people in Middle Tennessee.

Former New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp states it succinctly when he wrote that “the essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city’s memory.”

Emotions, stories, and memories flow through Union Station like so many trains. Emotions, stories, and memories like mine.

Union Station was incredibly busy in the years before the advent of the automobile, taking men, women, and children to places near and far, creating memories on a daily basis. Many were traveling for pleasure. But others — like African Americans riding in segregated cars during the Great Migration of the 20th century — were looking for a better life or, at least, a different life from the stifling restrictions of the Jim Crow South.

My father had an early encounter with Union Station when he joined the Navy during World War II. The station was never as busy as it was in those years, shipping young men and women like Tom Brown to bases and ultimately battlefields all across the globe.

My parents were part of the post-World War II marriage boom that begat the well-documented baby boom. Both were from the small town of Franklin, a rural farming and commercial center south of Nashville that grew in the early 20th century thanks to the connections made possible by the Interurban Railway, where Granddaddy Brown served a stint as a conductor. My father had just graduated with his engineering degree from Vanderbilt and was enrolled in a training program that led to his life-long career with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Mom, then a couple of years beyond her high school graduation, married my father on June 30, 1950, in downtown Franklin’s First Baptist Church just blocks away from their family homes. Before moving first to Columbia and soon thereafter to Cookeville for my father’s first major position with TVA, Tom and Helen Brown had a honeymoon to take.

Luckily for them, my father’s sister lived in Chicago. That meant that my parents came to Union Station — like so many honeymooners, soldiers, professionals, laborers, and families before them — and boarded a train bound for the Windy City. There’s a signboard behind the hotel check-in desk today that is from this era. I look up and see the same schedule that my parents saw as excited newlyweds, ready to begin their life’s journey together. The same schedule with those evocative Southern train names: The Azalean, The Humming Bird, Pan-American, The Georgian, Dixie Flyer.

One day in 2015 while at lunch (at Murfreesboro’s City Cafe, naturally), my father started talking about that train ride again, and he told me that he and mom left at midnight on “The Georgian.”  When my father was last in Union Station, he took a picture of the train schedule.  Sure enough, plain as day, you can see that the Georgian leaves Nashville at 11:59 p.m. on its way to Chicago.

Train Schedule
Historic Train Schedule from Nashville’s Union Station

I’ve heard stories my entire life about the theatre shows they saw in the city, the food they ate at the ethnic restaurants that was so foreign to their Southern palates, and their visit to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox. The facts from the trip have been filled in through the years, but the memories always originate with that train ride from Union Station. It is what makes it such a vivid part of my origin story.

Old places matter because their materials and appearances connect with human souls through emotions and memories. For some, those places may be mountains or streams. For others, buildings, neighborhoods, and streetscapes are involved.

The story of the saving of Union Station, like similar accounts of preservation successes in communities big and small, has thousands upon thousands of personal stories intertwined with the brick, stone, marble, and mortar. Stories and memories hold these places up, literally and figuratively, embedding the connections from the past into our lives today and in the future.

Everyone has an origin story, and many revolve around places. Because of the power of stories, Union Station remains today as a touchstone for innumerable individuals and families.

Emotions and stories flow through places, like the train leaving Union Station with two newlyweds bound for Chicago and a life unimagined ahead.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining why old places matter.

Image: Ceiling in Nashville’s Union Station by DJB

Speak up about what you think is important, to take up oxygen that otherwise feeds the hatred and division

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I am on a writing break and have been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. However, this new post — which comes entirely from the work of a historian I admire — arrived in my email inbox on March 4th, my birthday. I felt it was a gift I wanted to share with my readers.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes a daily newsletter entitled Letters from an American. It usually arrives in the early morning hours, calmly summarizing major events from the day’s news and placing them in the context of American history. In something of a surprise, she quickly became one of the most successful individual authors of a paid publication on the newsletter platform Substack. She is the opposite of the right-wing and mainstream media journalist, working at the level of conversation, not soundbite. Her followers and subscribers (including me) are devoted.

Today’s March 4th email began with the following.*

Every day, people write to me and say they feel helpless to change the direction of our future. 

I always answer that we change the future by changing the way people think, and that we change the way people think by changing the way we talk about things. To that end, I have encouraged people to speak up about what they think is important, to take up oxygen that otherwise feeds the hatred and division that have had far too much influence in our country of late.

Have any of your efforts mattered?

Well, apparently some people think they have. Last week, President Biden’s team reached out to ask if I would like some time with him to have a conversation to share with you all.

On Friday, February 25, I sat down with the president in the China Room of the White House to talk about American democracy and the struggles we face. 

Dr. Richardson noted that it was an “amazing time to be able to talk to the President.” Vladimir Putin had just attacked Ukraine, the president was preparing to give his first State of the Union address, and Biden “had just made the historic announcement of the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for a seat on the Supreme Court.”

In this thoughtful 30-minute conversation, held before a crackling fire in the White House, Richardson and Biden focus on how the president “thinks about America in this pivotal moment, to put the specifics of what he does in a larger context.” There are many wonderful segments, one of which involves the president telling how historian Jon Meacham came to help pick the portraits for use in the Oval Office.

Historians offering guidance to a president. What a wonderful thought.

In my books, (Richardson writes) I have argued that throughout our history, America has swung between the defense of equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the defense of private property outlined in the Constitution. 

Our peculiar history of racism has meant that every time it seems we are approaching equality before the law, those determined to prevent that equality have turned people against it by insisting that government protection of equality will cost tax dollars, thus amounting to a redistribution of wealth from those with property to those without. That is, if Black and Brown Americans, and poor people, are permitted to vote, they will demand roads and schools and hospitals, and those can be paid for only by taxes on people with money. In this argument, an equal say in our government for all people amounts to socialism. 

With this argument, those defending their property turn ordinary Americans against each other and take control of our political system. Once in power, they rig the system for their own benefit. Money flows upward until there is a dramatic split between ordinary people and those very few wealthy Americans who, by then, control the economy, the government, and society.

This point in the cycle came about in the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1920s, and now, again, in our present. 

In the past, just when it seemed we were approaching the end of democracy and replacing it with oligarchy — and in each of these periods, elites literally talked about how they alone should lead the country — the American people turned to leaders who helped them reclaim democracy.

We know these leaders from our history. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all have entered the pantheon of our leaders because of their defense of democracy in the face of entrenched power. But all of those presidents became who they were because they rose to the challenge of the pivotal moments in which they lived. They worked to reflect the increasingly loud voices of the majority of the American people.

James Buchanan, William McKinley, Herbert Hoover, and Donald Trump did not. 

And now President Biden stands at another pivotal moment in our history. What he does in this moment will reflect what the American people demand from his leadership.

Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson and President Joe Biden, for such a wonderful conversation. As one commentator wrote, Richardson’s “letter is my nightly north star. So happy to see you recognized by President Biden for the invaluable and trusted role you are playing as you interpret our living history.”

And she did it while wearing sensible shoes to the White House!

More to come…

DJB

*I have copied much of Heather Cox Richardson’s letter into this blog, because she always encourages her readers to share the information. But I encourage you to go to her site, read it there, and subscribe.

Image of the U.S. Capitol from Pixabay.

Don’t just sit there. Explore.

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While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Ideas. Relationships. Adventure. — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on June 26, 2017. 

I love to read. Avon — the small snail in Avi’s children’s fable The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant) — also reads every day. He is a kindred spirit. Books tell him “All about the things that creatures did when they went on adventures.” Having never been on an adventure, Avon decides that he needs adventures in order to be happy. When a passing newt hears his sigh, he encourages Avon to “go out and seek some adventures.”

Avon replies that he doesn’t know how.

“Remember lad,” said the newt, “if it’s going to be tomorrow, it might as well be today. And if it is today, it could have been yesterday. If it was yesterday, then you’re over and done with it, and can write your own book. Think about that.”

This delightful children’s book takes the reader through the multiple adventures — and occasionally snappy wordplay — of Avon and his friend Edward, the ant. They explore parts of their world, such as the end of the branch where Avon lives, that they had never visited before. They meet many different creatures. And they decide that even tiny adventures can broaden one’s worldview.

We are too often tied to our own branch, trapped in our own limited perspective.

Scholar and author Warren Bennis wrote the following in his landmark book On Becoming a Leader:

If I were restricted to three words in any commencement speech, they would be:  Ideas, Relationships, and Adventure.  Ideas are the basis for change, for re-invention, for, yes, intellectual capital.  Relationships have to do with outstanding people working in harmony and openness, where everyone feels empowered, where all members feel included and at the center of things, where they feel competent and significant.  And Adventure has to do with risk, with a bias towards action, with curiosity and courage.

The challenge for organizations and their leaders is, as Bennis states it, to “create the social architecture where ideas, relationships, and adventure can flourish.”  That isn’t easy, especially in light of challenges facing us today, but those who “choose to succeed must have the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures.”

Think about how this idea fits in with the fable of the snail and the ant. Avon had the idea that he wanted to travel and see the world. Avon and Edward built a good relationship. They had success and failure, but they stuck to it. Together they had adventures untold (for a snail and an ant).

So don’t just sit there and read about others. Create your own adventures. Explore!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining the joy and wonder of adventure.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay.

Retaining our childlike awareness and joy

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While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. I am still every age that I have been — a longer version of this piece — was originally posted on March 5, 2018. With a birthday coming in just a few days, this story is a good personal reminder that we can always call upon the joy and wonder we experienced as children, because we’re still that age.

I’ve recently taken to reading several children’s books, a trend that began a few years ago when I reread the classic A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. I was drawn back to that particular book at a time when our family was dealing with hip replacements, birthdays, and other challenges of adding years to our lives. With those changes, I was comforted by L’Engle’s thoughts on how we should age:

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide… Far too many people misunderstand what ‘putting away childish things’ means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and ‘be’ fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

Living through what you know and who you have been from the years of life is a way to understand current circumstances and embrace new possibilities. The quote popped into my head as I was thinking of L’Engle and the buzz about the A Wrinkle in Time movie that was being released about the same time. The folding of space and time is at the core of the story, as is the power of love over evil.

My children both read the book when they were young, and it remains among the most influential of their lives. My wife took a week-long writing class led by L’Engle almost 30 years ago and returned with a copy of “Wrinkle” signed by the author to me.  I pulled it out one weekend when a colleague said she had been encouraged by my earlier note to “read when it is inconvenient” and — in the midst of a busy week of board meetings — I began to re-read the book before the movie’s launch. 

Signed copy of A Wrinkle in Time
A prized copy of “A Wrinkle in Time”

As we face the years ahead, I’ve taken to thinking anew about what it means to be three, thirteen, twenty-five, forty, and (ahem) more all at the same time.  L’Engle’s push to retain a child’s awareness and joy seems like a great place for all of us to begin. There’s no time like the present.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining joy, wonder, and a childlike awareness of what is around us.

Image of young girl by Sergy Nemo from Pixabay.

America’s problem is not that we’re reading too many books

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While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Hopefully you’ll find a new insight or something that you may have missed. 

America is facing calls to ban and burn books. as author Ryan Holiday notes in his post Our country is filled with problems. Reading too many books isn’t one of them. That led me to look in the archives for something that would resonate on the topic. Libraries — places where books are central to civic life — quickly came to mind. In praise of public libraries — a longer version of this particular story —was originally posted on October 27, 2020.

Most communities have a place that even in technology-obsessed, anti-intellectual 21st-century America remains a surprisingly relevant bellwether institution: the public library.

Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America by James and Deborah Fallows provides a good example of why public libraries are both relevant and important. Our Towns is the story of a five year journey across the country — most of it undertaken at low altitude in a little propeller airplane — where the Fallows saw small and mid-sized towns that, in spite of hardship, also exhibited “the emerging pattern of American reinvention.”

One of the first places they stopped in each town to gather local information and to gauge the character of the community was the public library. *

James and Deborah Fallows found librarians in America’s public libraries committed to their communities, to reading, to learning, to public service, to the people who use their services, and to innovation. Librarians who are committed to books and what they can tell us beyond the crisis du jour of cable news networks and your Facebook feed.

People who are probably very much like my mother, a life-long reader who served for decades as the children’s librarian in our hometown.

Yes, my mother was known throughout our community as “Queen Helen, the Storytime Queen”. She knew all the children who used the library and their parents as well, and she was adored and appreciated. Mom was eager to point child and parent alike to a book that fit the need in that family at that moment. Her commitment to reading and education was one reason our family established the Helen Brown Scholarship Fund at First Baptist Church in Murfreesboro after her too-early death from cancer. For more than two decades, it has helped young people attend college. My sister Carol followed in her footsteps and now serves as the branch librarian at the same public library where Mom spent so many years.

Public Library in Staunton, Virginia

A 2020 article in the Washington Post entitled “The pandemic took away our family’s second home: the public library” brought back those memories and more. Writer Maggie Smith notes that while she misses a wide variety of places where she used to visit, “One of the places my kids and I miss most is the public library.”

When our children were young, my wife and the twins would go to the Staunton Public Library — located downtown in a repurposed and restored historic school building — on a regular basis. There they attended story-time and special events, or just read books that piqued their interest. At the end of each visit they would pick out a dozen or more treasures to bring home in our book box. I would tag along when work allowed, and the cycle repeated itself every week for several years. Smith tells a similar story as she and her children would visit their public library in Bexley, Ohio, once or twice a week. And just like as in Staunton,

“The children’s section is on the basement level, where you can look through the windows and see people’s shoes as they walk in the small courtyard outside. We’d descend the stairs together — or take the elevator when one of the kids was still in a stroller — and round the corner into a wonderland of books, puzzles and toys.”

Our children acquired a life-long passion for reading and writing, and they fit into a family pattern. Mother and Daddy loved to read and write, and my sister Carol and I acquired that same gene. Smith suggests that we “become readers before we discover we’re writers, and we become readers by being exposed to literature early and often.” It is our public libraries that make this exposure possible, free of charge. “Public libraries,” she adds, “are where readers — and, therefore, writers — are born.”

New York Public Library

Dr. Vartan Gregorian, the savior of the New York Public Library, talked eloquently about the importance of these places when he made the case for saving that city’s library system.

“The New York Public Library is a New York and national treasure,’”he said. “The branch libraries have made lives and saved lives. The New York Public Library is not a luxury. It is an integral part of New York’s social fabric, its culture, its institutions, its media and its scholarly, artistic and ethnic communities. It deserves the city’s respect, appreciation and support. No, the library is not a cost center! It is an investment in the city’s past and future!”

In the first two decades of the 21st century, libraries have reinvented themselves to serve a public that has very different needs from those of the first two decades of the 20th century or even the 1960s and 1970s of my youth. But they have done so in style, and have remained incredibly relevant, to the point that two journalists, flying across America in a small plane to get a sense of how the country is handling all this change, wouldn’t think of starting their search without a stop at the local public library.

More to come…

DJB

*See Deb Fallows post from November 2021 on how libraries continue to lead the way in America.

NOTE: If you want to read similar pieces on More to Come, consider:

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay. Photo of New York Public Library Reading Room by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash

Ukraine and the myths of war

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I am on a writing break and have been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. However, this new post — which consists of a few words and some pictures — wouldn’t stay inside me.

I woke up early this morning with Ukraine on my mind. President Joe Biden addressed the nation last evening and updated us on the threat of Russia’s launching another invasion of Ukraine. (See updates below.)

He emphasized that we and our allies stand behind Ukraine and pledge to continue diplomatic efforts to prevent a war, and yet will deliver “massive costs on Russia should it choose further conflict.” He urged Russia “to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table.”

Political scientist and journalist David Rothkopf tweeted that Biden is speaking as the leader of the free world. “It has been a long time since a U.S. president filled that role. His remarks were concise and pointed…and underscored Western resolve. But the headline: He is convinced [that] Putin has decided… to invade.”

Heather Cox Richardson, Letter from an American, February 18, 2020

The 42 million people of Ukraine will bear a heavy cost for Putin’s efforts to shore up his support in Russia while continuing to destabilize the west. In the words of Chris Hedges, a war in Ukraine will be a “mythic” war, where those involved will seek to imbue events with meanings they do not have.

In 2006, I visited the country, saw several places that have stayed with me ever since, and talked to Ukrainians as people with real hopes and dreams. A friend and former colleague did her Peace Corps stint in the country, leading us to talk on occasion about this special place, struggling to become a democracy as it is situated in an especially dangerous and strategic area.

Americans may not know much about Ukraine and even less about why we should care if Putin invades, but it matters for a host of reasons. As in all wars, loss of life, injury, and displacement top the list of terrible impacts. Cultural patrimony and beauty are also among the elements at risk.

The port city of Odessa on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine is full of charm. It’s known for its beaches and 19th-century architecture, including the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater.

A street scene in Odessa

Odessa’s monumental Potemkin Stairs, immortalized in the 1925 silent Soviet-era film The Battleship Potemkin, lead down to the waterfront with its Vorontsov Lighthouse.

Beautiful mosaics on an Odessa church

Sevastopol — along with the rest of Crimea — is internationally recognized as part of Ukraine. However, de facto it is administered by Russia, which illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. The city’s population has an ethnic Russian majority, with a substantial minority of Ukrainians.

Ruins of an ancient theatre in Sevastopol
Saint Vladimir Cathedral, a Neo-Byzantine Russian Orthodox cathedral, in Sevastopol

Yalta is another of the cities in the disputed territory of Crimea. If Americans know it at all, it is because of the famous Yalta Conference of 1945, where FDR, Churchill, and Stalin came together to discuss the postwar peace.

Sailing into Yalta
Site of the 1945 Yalta conference
Yalta Conference Museum

Of all the wonders of Ukraine I saw on that trip, it was when we left the grand coastal resort cities and visited a small, rural village that the people of the country became much more to me than just workers in the hospitality/tourism industry. The images and memory of this small village are what remain most vividly in my mind today.

Scenes from a Ukrainian village
Houses, garden plots, fields, and boats for navigating the waterways.
The view of a typical village compound

As Russia moved toward an invasion, I returned to read Chris Hedges’ important 2003 book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Hedges “has seen war, and its effect upon those who wage it, at close range.” And in this book, he brings “fifteen years of experience reporting from the front lines to bear on the very nature of war itself, its causes and consequences, and the physical, emotional, and moral devastation it leaves in its wake.” Hedges writes that while humility, love, and compassion are the only chances for the human race, war is hard to shake.

That is not only true for authoritarian regimes like Putin’s, but also for large segments of our citizenry.

War is both a deadly addiction — a drug that offers an unmatchable intoxication, the thrill of being released from the moral strictures of everyday life — and a unifying force that provides a sense of meaning, purpose, and self-sacrifice that can wash away life’s trivial concerns. But the meaningfulness of combat depends upon the myth of war. In reality, no matter what grand cause it is supposed to support, war is simply the basest form of aggression: “organized murder.” Once war begins, the moral universe collapses and every manner of atrocity can be justified in the eyes of those who wage it, because the cause is just, the enemy is inhuman, and only war can restore balance to the world.

There is a hollowness in such thinking, yet that is what is behind Putin’s call for war in Ukraine, and — unfortunately — it is also what drives the response for many who both support and oppose him. That war will have real consequences on the people and places that deserve better.

More to come…

DJB

UPDATE: At 10:58 p.m. Eastern Time on February 23, 2022, Russia invaded a peaceful country, without provocation. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote on that day, the “invasion of democratic Ukraine by authoritarian Putin is important. It not only has broken a long period of peace in Europe, it has brought into the open that authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.” As of Saturday evening, February 26th, Ukrainians are still fighting and defending their country from this unprovoked and illegal assault, and Vladimir Putin is being increasingly isolated. Three days later, here is the historian’s further update.

Image: Ukranian villager gathering reeds in the waterways near his home to use on his thatched roof (by DJB).

There is always time for kindness

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While on a winter break, I’ll revisit some of my favorite stories and book reviews from More to Come. Hopefully you’ll find a new insight or something that you may have missed. 

We’ve recently talked a great deal about kindness in our family, so I looked for something in the archives that would resonate. A longer version of this story about the kindnesses I received upon announcing my retirement was originally posted on January 14, 2019, under the title Kindness. I also link to three additional posts on kindness and gratitude at the end. Valentine’s Day seems to be an especially appropriate time to remember the lessons found in these posts.

I expected to hear from a number of people after announcing that I was retiring. Two decades with the same organization gave me innumerable opportunities to connect and work with people across the country and around the world.  I wasn’t quite ready, however, for the nature of the notes, emails, phone calls, hallway conversations, and comments that came my way.  I felt a bit like a man who wakes up in the casket at his own funeral and decides to lie there for a while just to hear people say nice things about him.

The overwhelming kindness of the remarks truly caught me off guard. That led me to think about the nature and effects of kindness. I also found quotes about kindness — sappy, inspirational, nonsensical, insightful, and more — for every occasion. My favorite, from the poet Mary Oliver, reads:

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

Kindness — like good-natured mischief and spontaneous singing — can touch our souls in unexpected ways.

I also thought not just about the nature of the notes but also about the different types of responses I received.  These include:

  • The “pithy and poignant” note. A new friend who prepared copy for our appeal letters sent an 11-word note that spoke volumes. Messages of kindness can be very short and to the point while carrying extraordinary power.
  • The “playing against type” note. One famously cranky preservationist sent me a very gracious and thoughtful note. In my response I told this long-time friend that it was clear that his email account had been hacked and that the hacker was saying nice things about me. I suggested that if he didn’t regain control of his account quickly, I was afraid his curmudgeonly reputation would soon be in tatters.
  • The “voice from the past” note. People that I’ve known professionally over the past four decades reached out to me, some of whom I had not heard from in years. I was reminded that you can never lose touch, and a voice from the past can add context and richness to a time that can be bittersweet at best.
  • The “small acts of kindness” note. There is a whole inspirational industry built up around “small acts of kindness.” Small acts have ripple effects that we can’t even imagine. You never know who is watching your actions and where the ripples will reach.

Kindness often gets a bad rap for being soft. My experience is that it is possible to be kind and yet make the very difficult decisions required as we move through work and life.  Unfortunately, many people value so-called leaders who are never kind, granting a type of permission to bully those with whom they disagree.  John Steinbeck noted these contradictions when he said,

“It has always seemed strange to me… the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

As we deal with turbulent times, I am reminded that history has leaders who can show us a better way forward.  Through the Great Depression and World War II, few dealt with more challenges than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Yet he recognized what mattered when he said, “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

I am very grateful for the many kindnesses shown to me over the years. Having been the recipient of extraordinary kindnesses as I retired, I know the positive effect kind words and gestures can have on an individual. Be kind to one another. It matters.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: I have always found that kindness and gratitude are linked. Those who practice one tend to also practice the other. If you are interested in exploring further, here are other More to Come posts examining kindness and gratitude that you may find of interest.

Image of children walking by Annie Spratt from Pixabay. Fall scene from Devotion, North Carolina, by DJB

Smart Phones

Another look at boundaries

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While on a winter break, I’ll revisit some of my favorite stories and book reviews from More to Come. Hopefully you’ll find a new insight or something that you may have missed. This book review about setting limits in order to be great was originally shared here on November 5, 2018, as Boundaries.

Understanding the reality you face is often the first step toward personal and organizational growth.

Consider the oft-heard complaint about our lack of time in this period of ubiquitous technology.   While most of us think of this as the “Information Age,” the reality may be that it would be better characterized as the Age of Attention.  In an age of information abundance, the scare resource is attention.  Technology companies make money when they monopolize our time.  Netflix’s CEO has made this clear in noting that the company “is competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc.”

Let that last one sink in a bit…your sleep is seen as a competitor by Netflix.  If you had any idea that technology companies were looking out for your best interests, this should dissuade you of that notion.

Stand Out of Our Light
Stand Out of Our Light by James Williams

I’m currently reading Stand Out of Our Light, a book written by a former Google strategist turned Oxford-trained philosopher.  James Williams’ career arc was enough to get me to buy the book, but I was equally intrigued to read his take on how “technologies compete to capture and exploit our attention, rather than supporting the true goals we have for our lives.”  From endless games of solitaire to never-ending clickbait to Facebook news feeds to YouTube recommendations that entice us to watch just one more video…we’ve all seen how digital technology eats up our time by capturing more and more of our attention.

Williams believes that the goals of technology companies don’t match our best interests (individually and as citizens), making it imperative that we set our own boundaries.  He quotes the German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who said, “Who will be great, must be able to limit himself.”  Williams is focused on the capacities that enable us to “want what we want to want,” capacities such as “reflection, memory, prediction, leisure, reasoning, and goal-setting.” We have to apply boundaries in order to “channel our activities toward our higher goals.”

While technology could help us deal with these challenges, that’s not the way of life in our current age.  As  you reflect on that, realize that,

“…notifications or addictive mobile apps may fill up those little moments in the day during which a person might have otherwise reflected on their goals and priorities.  Users check their phones an average of 150 times per day (and touch them over 2,600 times per day), so that would add up to a lot of potential reflection going unrealized.”

There is much we can do in response, and the book looks at steps we should take individually and collectively.  I decided some time ago not to use notifications with my technology, believing that leaving on the email notification feature is like letting the post office rush in and drop a letter on your desk every time you receive an email or text.  Start with the mindset that your email in-box – and essentially all technology – should be for your use, and then work from there.  Such a perspective may help you see the reality a bit more clearly and spend more time on what you want to want.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: I realize that by providing you with additional links, I could be accused of directing your thinking and asking for additional time similar to YouTube. So, I simply note — with absolutely no pressure — that should you want additional perspectives on this topic, feel free to take a look at the following from More to Come…

Revisiting serendipity and presence

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While I’m on a winter break, we’ll revisit some of my favorite stories and book reviews from More to Come. Hopefully you’ll find something that you may have missed in the earlier iteration. This wonderful story on a serendipitous encounter that I almost missed was originally shared here on July 8, 2018, as Be present when serendipity strikes.

It was a flight like dozens of others I’d taken in the summertime: delayed due to thunderstorms, with the prospect of climbing into bed much later than planned.

Harp Guitar
Harp Guitar

When I finally boarded the flight from Nashville after a day’s work on our campaign to save Music Row, it barely registered that my two seatmates had stashed guitars in the luggage bin. This was Nashville, after all. I mumbled a couple of hellos, and promptly fell into my customary power nap. Waking up thirty minutes later, my laptop was opened as I started work on a project that was overdue.

Only after returning to my seat later in the flight did I exchange real conversation with the woman seated in the middle seat, between her boyfriend and me.  I asked what type of guitar she played.  She replied, “One’s a harp guitar and the other is a flamenco guitar.”  Bing!  I suddenly woke up.  Harp guitars are pretty esoteric instruments, and those who play them approach their music with religious zeal.  They also tend to be very good musicians.

I mentioned the music of Stephen Bennett, a harp guitar devotee, whose music I happened to be listening to at that moment on my iPad.  She replied that she knew Stephen, and then seeing that the terrific guitarist and composer Alex De Grassi was next in my musical queue, she said “I’m playing with Alex next week.” She followed that by asking if I knew Tommy Emmanuel, another stellar guitarist.  I replied that I knew his music, but didn’t know him personally, upon which she handed me her headphones and played a video from a recent concert where he joined her for an impromptu—and beautiful—duet on one of her compositions.

At this point I stuck out my hand and said, “Hi, I’m David Brown.”  She replied, “I’m Muriel Anderson.”

Oh my goodness.  I was sitting next to the woman whom I’d proclaimed my love for to God and the internet, after hearing her version of the Beatles tune Day Tripper. And I had wandered all over BWI airport several years ago trying to find where she was going to play in a gig promoted as BWI Live.

Muriel Anderson
Muriel Anderson

Over the last half hour of the flight we talked guitar makers (her harp guitar was built by Mike Doolin and I showed her pictures of my two Running Dog guitars by luthier Rick Davis), harp guitar festivals, historic preservation and the importance of saving Music Row, and her newest album Nightlight Daylight, which is a two-CD set with music for the morning and music for the evening.  She was pleased that Guitar Player magazine named Nightlight Daylight among the top 10 CDs of the decade but even more pleased, I think, to show me the interactive fiber-optic lighted CD cover.  (Push on the moon and the night stars come out. Very cool!)

This is a musician who has collaborated with some of the best:  the late guitarists Chet Atkins and Les Paul, for example.  Yet she was as engaging, lively, down-to-earth, and interesting in person as she came across on stage and in her music.  When I mentioned the National Trust had a hand in saving RCA Studio A in Nashville, she immediately said, “And you saved Chet’s office!”  I told Muriel that I’d had the privilege of sitting in that very office, fingerpicking on a beautiful guitar owned by the man who bought the building at the 11th hour. As we were leaving I said, “I have a Gallagher guitar at home, and I bet you can guess why.”  After thinking a bit she said, “You’re a Doc Watson fan, and that was Doc’s guitar.”  Then she added, “He was my first guitar hero.”  I knew that having read it online at some point.  He was mine as well.

This experience reminded me—once again—of how much we need to wake up and focus on life. Not all encounters are so serendipitous or pleasurable, and yours—when they happen—will be different.  Perhaps you’ll get to meet the writer you’ve always admired, or gain an insight for work you’ve long sought but needed a serendipitous moment to find.  When it happens it can be wonderful.  Trouble is, you won’t have the chance if you don’t take your head away from the screen or out of the conversation in your head, and talk with real people.

Have a good week, and when a bit of serendipity comes your way, may you be present to receive it.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Muriel Anderson and Tommy Emmanuel — playing together at All Star Guitar Night 2018 as she showed me on my fateful airplane ride.

The books I read in January 2022

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Each month I have a goal to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in January 2022. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Because I have begun a winter break, the posts for February and perhaps March may not be up until April, but I continue to read and will eventually get around to them. Enjoy!

Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures (2020), is a vibrant and vision-changing work. As his name suggests, Merlin Sheldrake can conjure up delightful prose and mind-blowing connections that educate, charm, enlighten, and broaden the reader’s understanding of fungi — that indispensable part of life on earth. Sheldrake’s first book reads like a page-turning adventure story right from the beginning. He has managed to inject a sense of wonder — and more importantly, a wonder-filled joy — into his study. We are all the richer for it.

How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, democracy and the continuing fight for the soul of America (2020) is Heather Cox Richardson’s searing, provocative, and masterful history of how America’s competing claims of equality and subordination have been used by oligarchs to tap into the extraordinary strength of the ideology of American freedom to undermine freedom and liberty for anyone who is not white and male. After their defeat in the Civil War, they regrouped and aligned with business and extraction interests in the West to create a new political power based on hierarchies and exemplified by Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan that changed our country’s trajectory toward equality. How the South Won the Civil War is full of surprises, wisdom, and insight.

Historic Houses of Worship in Peril: Conserving Their Place in American Life (2020) is Thomas Edward Frank’s look at the meaning of these community landmarks and the implications of the rapid change that is reshaping the physical and cultural landscape around them. This is not a “how to” book of preservation but is written with the intention of helping the reader reconsider assumptions, learn more about the meaning for those who experience these places, and perceive more clearly their place in society. It led me to think of the historic houses of worship that have shaped my life, thoughts I share in the post.

Your True Home: The everyday wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh (2011 — compiled and edited by Melvin McLeod) has been part of my daily reading, so when the news came this month of the passing of this wise man, his work was very much on my mind. The 365 meditations in Your True Home are focused on the monk’s embrace of mindfulness. Each meditation is only a few sentences in length, but the brevity is part of what contributes to their power. Meditation #22, which coincides with the day of Thich Nhat Hanh’s passing, is entitled The Lamp of Mindfulness.

We have a lamp inside us, the lamp of mindfulness, which we can light anytime. The oil of that lamp is our breathing, our steps, and our peaceful smile. We have to light up that lamp of mindfulness so the light will shine out and the darkness will dissipate and cease. Our practice is to light the lamp.

What if Everybody Squeezed the Cat?
What if everybody squeezed the cat!

If Everybody Did (1960) by Jo Ann Stover is the first book I remember reading as a child. It had been on my mind recently, so I reread it this month and found that the quirky children’s book with the funky illustrations is a primer on how to live together. We are all a mess of contradictions so living in community is difficult enough in normal times. These are not normal times, in part because too many people in public life today clearly never internalized the lessons found in this classic.

Enjoy reading!

More to come…

DJB

The Weekly Reader series features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. 

Bookshelves image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay.