Inside My World... A Little Later

It is now 2018. I have not posted a blog for nearly six years. So who am I now? What am I doing? Where am I headed?

First off, the world has markedly changed since I posted my last entry in  2012. The world has become far more polarized and contentious. As has our country, under our new President, who is proving to be less than meets the eye. And I have changed significantly. I am now 71. I am retired as is my wife, Marilyn. Mostly by accident, we have landed on our feet financially. But then it is better to lucky than to be just smart and talented and successful.

So I pick my battles. I avoid confrontations when it is perfectly plain that a particular battle is not worth fighting and potentially very expensive. It is actually most pleasant that I can find happiness more often than not, as I move from day to day. I do plan ahead more now. But I live from day to day, doing my best to navigate the pitfalls and challenges  that that confront me. And I do my best to pursue endeavors that make sense.

And I have learned to distinguish between the things I think I would like to possess and the things that I actually need to acquire. Possessing lovely, expensive things means less to me these days than my relationships with the people who are important to me and the quality of my life.

When I figured out how to get back into Blogger, I figured it was time to start writing again. Writing is a great way to sort out what I know and don't fully understand. It is an amazing to explore the world by probing and examining what I see and hear each day. It is an opportunity to rejoin the larger world and perhaps occasionally write something that is meaningful out there. Yes, we are all bombarded daily by television, radio and the news. But if I can make even a small contribution to enabling a few of you out there to better make sense of the crazy, contentious world in which we now live, it is worth it for me to rejoin the world of blogging. I will do my best to inform you, to entertain you and to hopefully enable you to navigate all the conflicting messages which bombard us daily.

I am delighted to be back. So, as Rachel Maddow often says on her broadcasts, watch this spot for worthwhile things.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman

Working notes: Jump Starting things when things go south

These are difficult times. We can choose to struggle on each day and do whatever it takes just to get through the day. Or we can choose to allow ourselves to get beaten down by the challenges we face. Life never presents us with a level playing field and fairness is never guaranteed. We really have only one viable option: to soldier on each day, no matter how crappy a day it may be. 

Note to myself: Broadway or Bust... forgetting about having the dream when I was younger.... forgetting how it felt to stand on the stage for the first time and feeling for the first time that there were great possibilities for me in my life.

Note: About why it is so important to surround myself with people who are not just good, but are very good and very talented... forces me to up my own game and never settling for what is easy or what I can just get away with. And never forgetting that I am only as good as I am today. 

Note: About already knowing that in whatever I do, I cannot just do what it takes to get my. And never start out at 50% working towards 100%. Rather that I need to start out at 100% or higher and see how much more and how much better I can be than that today. And then start from the higher benchmark when I start out tomorrow. 

Rediscovered these things in the last few days. Since before I fell a few months ago and even before, I have lived in a downward spiral. I have stopped doing things that I really enjoyed and which gave me a sense of joy in my life. I had stopped writing or ushering at the theater. I had stopped trying to get new accounts. I had not read much. I was sleeping too much and could not force myself out of the house. I have been mildly depressed and i have not felt good inside. There is no joy in just treading water every day.

I am now 66. I probably have many more years to live, although there are no guarantees that that will be the case. But I am surely not dead yet and it is time to do something proactive about my present state of mind. 

At minimum, I have to think about the things that I cannot do or which are not feasible for me to do today. Instead, I need to inventory my skill sets and the positive aspects of my personality and figure out what I can utilize to turn things around... and what my options are. One of the other things I forgot is that when I write, I can work through a problem. And also that even in the worst of times, we are presented with amazing opportunities that will jump start our lives once more. And that the trick to getting on in a positive way with our lives is to open our eyes and look around. If we do, we will see something that we missed or that no one else is seeing, and when we do see that something, for us the good times start up again for us.

Allowing ourselves to fall into a funk clouds our minds and causes us to suffer from a mental fog. And to forget the important things that we have learned along the way. As with all things human, to clear the mental fog, it will start with a decision to something proactive, even if it is only a small step in the right direction.

Oh, yes... there is that other thing that I forgot. If today has been really awful, just go to bed and get up tomorrow. Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better and if we are very lucky, we will begin to string together one good day after another. And when we do that, we are alive again and on our way to whatever comes next. 

Living Life on a Need to Know Basis

Have you ever felt like you couldn't hear yourself think? Happens to me everyday. And not just when I am focusing on important things, like the items on my to do list or at work. It happens when self-appointed guardians of  truth fill  my eyes and ears with their take on what is right, true, moral and righteous. It happens when other people try to tell me how to live my life. This phenomena also takes place when I am just trying to relax or enjoy the moment.

Here's how I see it. I have to make the decisions in my life. I am the one who is rewarded when I make the right decisions and I am the one who pays the price when I don't. So it just seems reasonable that I should be the person who decides what I believe to be ethical, just, fair... and what I choose to like or dislike. I am the person who gets to define who I am and what I believe. And when it comes time just to kick back and enjoy myself, I get to decide what things are okay to do, to read, to see and to indulge in. And the flip side of that coin is that if I make a bad choice, I must also take full responsibility for what I have said or done.

So here and now, I declare that I am choosing to live my life on a need to know basis. No one else gets to pick and choose for me what I need to know to get through the day, and emerge at the end of the day still in one piece. That is my absolute inalienable right.

Loving The Idea of America

I truly appreciate that I am an American. I would not go so far as to say that I love America. Instead, I love the idea of America and what this country stands for.

Even if this country is not a perfect place, I can think of no other country in which I would choose to live. Our democratic system has always been messy and contentious. The playing field has never been absolutely level. There have always been social and economic inequities. But at least in the U.S., there is the sense that fairness and equality for all people is something we strive to attain.

Let us never forget that this is a country where we can still dream and hope for a better life. Even in the worst of times, there are still wonderful opportunities to grow and expand our lives. And if the quality of social or legal justice is not always perfect, it trumps justice in most of the rest of the world.

At this writing, we are still a free people, allowed to speak our mind and wield the power that comes with being an American citizen, if we have the courage to exercise that option. In the end, it takes courage to be an American citizen, because when we champion a cause, popular or not, we take a risk. But we are a people who took a great risk in the 1700's in demanding our freedom from England. We continue to take risks, individually and as a nation, and occasionally even rise to the level of being a shining beacon of hope for peoples all across our globe.

I am proud to be an American.

Howard Fireman

Catching the Rising Wind

Back in the days of sailing ships, sailors dreaded areas of the ocean where for days or weeks the winds would die down and the ship was stuck wherever it found itself. They called such places the doldrums. The captain and crew had to wait until the winds returned before they could move on again to their intended destination.

In our lives we experience periods of time when that very thing happens to us. Something happens to us or someone says something to us and whatever forward momentum we have in our lives is lost for the moment. It is a mental thing. Our mind finds itself unable to function productively. We lose our sense of purpose and it becomes difficult if not momentarily impossible to prioritize anything on our to do list. As a matter of fact, we may experience a feeling of mild depression that causes us to wonder what is the point of doing anything. For people who have experienced depression, this is the bottom of the valley of the roller coaster ride they suffer with regularity.

So what is one to do? First we must find a quiet place away from where one lives and away from the people in one's life... a neutral place with no memories or negative connotations that might distract us. Then, we must remember what we value, what we enjoy, what we believe is important to do and to be. We must remember the place we have found for ourselves in the world where we make a difference. We must remember whatever it is that we do that gives us a reason to get up in the morning and face the new day. And from that we have to extract out those reasons and say them over and over again to ourselves. By doing that, we recapture our sense of purpose and our goals and our dreams and our aspirations. Only when we have done that can we face the world again with some strength and resolve.

So we are ready to face the world again. Now it is time draw upon what we have learned along the way. Most of what we have learned about making it in life came from the hard school of experience. What we know comes from making mistakes and from stumbling. It comes from the painful remembrances of picking ourselves up and redeeming ourselves in our family and in our community. After awhile, these life lessons become less moments in our lives than bullet points stored somewhere in that part of our brain that stores the set of rules for living life from day to day.

What have I learned? Here are the bullet points of my own personal credo:

• The mistakes we make are opportunities to learn something important.
• Live life one day at a time.
• Our life is like a string of pearls. Each day is just one pearl in that string. If I have a bad day, just get through it as best I can. Tomorrow is another day and I will face it when I get there.
• My life will never be as good as I want it to be nor will it be as bad as the hypothetical worse case scenario.
• Be very forgiving of others. Like them, I say and do things I have regretted doing. People have forgiven me when I did that. Relationships are two-way streets and I must be willing to do the same thing. More importantly, learn how to forgive yourself when you say or do something regrettable.
• I am who I am and what I am. I have to do the best I can with what I have to work with.
• One of my important goals is to be able to live with the person I see in the mirror.
• Establishing a routine in my life is critical.
• Having goals (short-term, mid-term, long-term) is absolutely critical if one is going to accomplish anything.
• I must never forget my dreams and aspirations, no matter how difficult life proves to be.

I know that there are more things I have learned in my life. Mostly my point is to provide some examples of wisdom we can glean from every day we live. The trick is to keep the list somewhere handy when life throws something unexpected our way, so we don't forget. Our lives are not always going to be wonderful, so that when things get bumpy, these bullet points will help us to keep things in perspective.

So if you find yourself trapped in the doldrums, be ready to sail when the wind starts to blow.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman

Stalled and Inbetween

Sometimes I have to make concessions to reality and refocus on the things making the greatest demands of me. At the moment, it is all about making more money to make ends meet. That demand is always there, if only lurking somewhere in the background.

I was working on building a new business, a sales venture. Things were beginning move along and there was a sense of momentum, with each passing day. All I really wanted to do was focus on the new business. And I did just that at the expense of my accounting activities.

My wife was growing very anxious as I was bringing in less and less money from accounting... and at the reality that my new venture was not yet producing any income. She made it very clear that I needed to focus on my core source of income from accounting and put off the new venture until we had a secure source of income from accounting.

Well she got her way and rightly so. But for me there was a real cost. Up to the the moment i had to put the new venture on the back burner, I had established a certain rhythm to my days and weeks. And I was feeling a very definable level of excitement at my financial propects as I set out to build my new business. And when I did a short time out to deal with my realities, it felt as if in the immediate moment my whole life was derailed.

The old saying goes that men and women makes plans and God laughs at the folly of it. God gives us aptitudes and abilities that lend themselves to certain professions. In my case one of the things I am able to do with some ease is accounting. Accounting is all right, as professions go. But like everyone else in the world, I would rather be doing something else to make a living. In an ideal world, that would not be a problem. But at the best of financial times, it is never an ideal world. The financial landscape today is particularly not an ideal one.

So here I am, reorganizing my routine... again. Trying to put together a new game plan. And when I am writing my blog entries, I have the unsettling feeling that I am having a conversation with myself. I am not coming up with any solutions yet. I am just putting the facts of the situation out in front of myself, so I can get a good sense of where I am in this moment and figure out what I really need to accomplish right now. This is time for drastic short term thinking. This is survival time. It occurs to me that the reason that I cannot seem to think clearly since I have had to confront this lack of income is that this is a first-things-first moment. Is the reality that I cannot move forward with any other plans or endeavors until I effectively deal with this matter?At the moment, the playing field is anything but level or equal. For me to navigate to what comes next, I have to secure the present. I have to secure steady income in the short term. Then I can look at other options and pursue them if it makes sense to do so.

Yes I am momentarily stalled in my life, but only momentarily. I am in between where I was and where I will be. Now that I understand where I am, I can do what I have to do and then move on to what comes next. However, now I have to go back to focusing on one task at a time and live one day at a time. Before you know it, I will be on my way once again.

A Thirst for Gravitas

As I do every year during the Jewish High Holidays, I take a brief glance back at the year just past and I take a moment to figure out what I want to achieve in the year to come. This year, there is a new stirring in my soul. As I am 65 years old now and my head is full of gray hairs, I would like to think that I have become smarter and wiser than I was when I was 45 or even 50. But more than that, I would like others to recognize this quality of hard-won gravitas in me.

In my heart, I am not sure that I have earned that level of respect just yet. The truth is that our past precedes us. The mantle of gravitas must be earned over a period of many years. People judge us over time on our consistency and our track record in our professions over a long period of time. People who have moved from success to success to success during their lives gain such respect. People who have lived ethically throughout their lives get points for that as well. The other thing about a lot of individuals with gravitas is that they imbue their lives with a large dose of humility.

With respect to living ethically, no problem there. In part, I pretty well understood the difference between right and wrong from the getgo, although I stumbled from time to time, as most of us have. And in part, it was a healthy fear of getting caught, if I were to choose to cross the line. I really didn't want to pay the price for living recklessly. Living ethically was not the problem for me.

Neither was the matter of making humility a quality of my life. To my mind, an overweening ego is a real liability. People with big egos give themselves just enough rope to hang themselves. As the song goes, the higher the top, the longer the drop. I think I lost most of my ego in a really disastrous session of playing poker, to my best recollection.

But I do have an Achille's heel. For a very long time, I lived my life haphazardly. I wasn't very focused and not very consistent in the outcomes of my pursuits. I wasn't of those people who had a clear vision of what I wanted to do with my life. One year it was one thing and the next year it was completely different one. I would often joke that I could never fully figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up... and I was saying that well into my 50's. So there was no consistency from year to year in terms of the jobs I had or the career paths I took. They say that we learn from the things we do that don't work out. By that metric, I should have been the smartest of men in the world by the time I was 50. Well, I wasn't, because I just sort of drifted for a lot of years in my life, in search of who I was, where I fit into the world and what it was that I should be doing in my life.

Actually, knowing what I know now, I have already figured out that there are a lot of things, both material and virtual, that mean little or nothing in the larger scheme of things. I have learned that less is more and living a leaner life is infinitely better than the alternative. So I can take pride in that I am making some of the right choices and actions in the present. I just have to keep reminding myself that life is about the journey, not the milestones or the destination. Along the way, we are going to be evaluated and judged on how we conduct ourselves during the journey and on the outcomes of our efforts. My mantra now is that I am only as good as what I am doing today, and that critical bit of wisdom keeps me focused, committed and on course.

Needless to say, the jury is not quite ready to come to a verdict. The people who know me too well... like my wife and my kids... are not quite ready to grant me the mantle of gravitas I so crave. They are patiently waiting to see if I stay on track. I can't change my past. But the future has not yet been written. At least I am on my way and with a certainty headed in the right direction. Some lines from Sondheim say it all: if you know where you are going, you are already gone. If all things are equal, this time it will be a keeper.

Becoming Strangers in a Strange Land

When we wake up and look out each day, more and more we find ourselves to be strangers in an increasingly unrecognizable world. Too much ongoing change and no time to adjust from moment to moment to each new alteration to our realities. As I get older, I desperately realize that I must find a way to somehow minimally comprehend from moment to moment where the world is and where it seems to be going. How else am I going to be able to make the difficult choices and decisions?

Of course, that is an absurd thing to try to do. We live in an age of ever accelerating change. We are bombarded by so many messages, images and sounds every second of every day that we are forced go filter out everything except that which is immediately relevant to our own lives. Over time, we lose the capacity to comprehend the bigger picture. We have our lives to live and little if any time left over a the end of the day to capture the critical information we need to know. So, little by little, we become cultural illiterates in our own society and in our world.

Of course, in time, we will look back and sort out the pattern of the past. We will retrace the path that brought us, we arrogant human beings, to this moment. Hindsight usually serves that purpose. Historians will capture the essence of the past for us and revisionists will put their particular spin on what the historians have written. Hopefully, we will be able to sort out what passes for truth from the bullshit.

However, in the present time, we should still be able to get some sense of where the rushing stream of time is carrying us. Thankfully, the internet gives us easy access to a wealth of information sources. It is a matter of first beginning with defining what we want to know. Then we need to carefully figure out the questions we need to ask, carefully framing the questions and then looking for the answers we seek. We have to allocate the time to do this and time is a commodity which is in short supply for most of us. So we are going to have to give up some of the "pleasures" of life.

What will that get us? Some understanding of what we are up against in the larger world. There is just too much to take in. The environment. Politics. The ethics or lack thereof in the matter of abortion and capitol punishment. Economics. The lousy economy. Wars. Inequalities in society. Education issues. Who is going to win the Superbowl? What is happening in the Arts. Is Global Warming a real deal? And so on... and so on. The best that we will be able to do is to focus on a few things that are important to us and settle for that. If it was tough to be a universal man ( or woman) in the past, it is infinitely tougher to do that today.

We know that the world is being changed in radical ways every day. The period from 1900 to 1930 marked the end of the 19th century take on theater, ballet, music and literature, and the transformation of the Arts into a reflection of what the world was actually becoming in the 20th century. In our own times, evolving technologies have touched the ways we communicate, how we think about things, how we do things, the sounds of our times, our values and how we entertain ourselves. The computer and the internet have forever altered the landscape of human life. We live in amazing and equally terrifying times. We have quite a task before us if we are going to make any sense of our new realities.

I won't begin to even suppose that I can lay out a game plan to do this in this brief posting. But most certainly, I will pose a challenge to everyone who reads this post. Instead of always pursuing some of our more pointless diversions (television, video games, texting), begin to become aware of the world about you. Start asking serious questions when you see something that seems dangerous or very wrong. When you see real problems around you, make a real effort to put your own house in order and maybe even make a difference in the world.

We live in contentious and desperate times. We can rationalize that there is no reasonable way that we can ever understand the changes in the world. And we can be blindsided when things go disastrously wrong. Or we can at least try to make an effort to understand the state of things and make a difference in the outcome not just for us individually, but for our family, our country or the world

The current realities are ever a moving target, morphing minute to minute. We face a daunting task to do reality checks from time to time to take a measure of where reality stands in that moment. But if it is a nearly impossible task, we still have to do it, if we are going to make sure we are headed in the right direction. It is just something we have to do. Not fun, but necessary.

A Day Inside My World

So everything is not exactly as I would prefer it to be in my life. Oh well! But things are simpler and more manageable. Anymore, it is less about the quantity of life and more and more about the quality of life. These realities served as the backdrop for this day.

Random reflection one:

Next year I will be 65 years old, whatever that is supposed to mean or signify. As I approach this milestone of my journey, I have at least come to terms with certain realities. I probably will never accumulate a fortune in money or material things. I probably won't ever build some impressive empire in business or in any other arena. My persona will fall on the rather modest size. That is okay too because the height that my reputation will rise won't be noticeably high, so I would have a shorter distance to fall when my empire disintegrates.

But I have and will continue to live an interesting life. Life has given more good things than painful or disappointing things. And I don't suffer from the sense that I am alone in the universe. All in all, a situation with which I can live.

Random reflection two:

What if much of what we thought was true about our cultural roots proved to be incomplete or just plain wrong? What if newly acquired knowledge threatened to undermine the very foundations of what we know about the story of our species? How are we supposed to grapple with the fact that some of our most precious beliefs were borrowed from peoples whom we were taught to see as uncivilized or barbaric?

Read the book, 1491. It recreates the world of the Americas, North and South, before the Europeans landed on these shores. The historical narrative of North and South America before 1492 has been rewritten as archeologists and scientists from numerous other disciplines have made discoveries that are causing human history to be rewritten. The Inkas, the Mayans and all the other Indian nations that inhabited these two continents have been shown to have been as civilized and sophisticated as any European or Asian nation that was contemporary with them from earliest recorded history. Ironically, the "New" world contributed far more to the "Old" world of Europe than the other way around. We will never know how much knowledge and science was lost after disease killed over 95% of the peoples who populated the Americas.

I came away from reading this book with the sense of how little I really understand about what I observe in the world about me. How few facts I actually have at my disposal and how what seems to be perfectly reasonable assumption is at some level wrong, because it is based on answers to the wrong questions or on the wrong interpretation of data. I am humbled by how little I really know about anything. I have the sense that I am just a bit player on a enormous stage and the truth that there is to know is a constantly moving target. So much for hubrus as a working strategy in life.

Random thought three:

I don't always have access to a car any more. So I have to take the bus to and from work. The very rhythm of my life has changed. I find the pace of my life has slowed down. I cannot just get up and go somewhere. There is time waiting for the bus to come. Getting from here to there is no longer a straight shot, but indirect and circuitous. It is life in the slower lane and life in which one is more critically dependent on others to successfully get through each day. It is life restructured and revised. It is what it is... not necessarily worse than life with a car, just different.

Playing Dodgeball in the Real World

We spend so many of your early years preparing to enter the real world, with no certain idea of what we will find there. At some point in our lives we arrive. What we discover is that the world of preparing for the real world and the real world have two things in common. In both venues, we are waiting for something to happen. Both places give one the sense that being there is like playing an endless game of dodgeball.

Truthfully, being a grownup is no more fun than being a kid. I don't get to do everything I want to do or be all the things I want to become. I have merely traded one set of boundaries and constraints for another, only now the cost of breaking the rules has certainly escalated. If one is so foolish as to paint oneself into a corner, one mus take full possession of having acted on some poor choices. And then one has to clean up the mess one has made. At least that is the case for those of us who are not born into privileged circumstances.

And life does feel like a dodgeball game. We make plans, we prepare and we do what we have to do to succeed. Just because we do all the right things to prepare ourselves guarantees nothing. Something completely random or unexpected can blindside us. In the real world, the level playing field is essentially a myth. One must acknowledge that there are certain people whom I call the "golden people." Such people are very talented and intellectually brilliant. They are focused and disciplined. It doesn't occur to them that they can or might stumble. In their mind, they are going to get what they set out to acquire. And they do, with some regular consistency. But for the rest of us, life is very often the stuff of avoiding some incoming dodgeball.

Exploring the many situations we might face or the reason life can be very challenging at this moment wouldn't be especially useful. I would just be pointing out situations and truths that most of already have learned the hard way.

I will say that the one option we can never exercise is to just give up. We will have moments in our lives which are redemptive, triumphant and wonderful. Hopefully, at such moments, we will be able to share those moments with someone dear to us. Our lives are really about those moments, even if such moments are precious and few.

So life is generally going to be a struggle. Oh, well! We should have figured out early on that it wasn't going to be a cake walk. At least there will be moments of clarity and triumph and joy for every one of us.