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Sentinels of Isolationism

Part of doing great accountability is helping people avoid the dangers of isolation. When we’re isolated, we can’t really progress. Now, I’ll be the first to say that too much progress is not necessarily a good thing. But when we’re truly isolated, not only are we prone to flawed-character activity (i.e. sin) but we also can’t really learn anything new from others. Anything from technology to language. We cease to communicate, and we end up like the Sentinelese: I became fascinated by the Sentinelese culture and spent an entire evening reading everything there is on the internet. Which isn’t much. Because they’re very isolated. So that’s the point.

North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Island chain contains the greatest example of an isolated culture left on the face of the earth. Numbering somewhere between 50 and 400, the inhabitants are locked in Stone Age life; it’s unclear whether they’re capable of using fire; their weapon of choice is a bow and arrow or spear, which they might be tipping with metal from shipwrecks. When intruders come for a visit the good Sentinelese people kill them. The Indian government, which recognizes them as essentially sovereign, understands their position to be one of self-defense. The last time they killed some poaching fishermen, the Indian government did nothing. As near as I can tell there has only been one exception to this rule of violence, when a group of anthropologists from India took gifts of coconut and came very close to shore.

The Indian government’s official policy is that nobody is to allowed to contact the Sentinelese. For one thing, nobody can speak their language. You’re likely to be killed; in this image a Sentinel Islander dares a helicopter to land. The pilot decided against it.

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And you’re likely to kill them — by spreading infectious disease the Sentinelese are unable to combat.

It is incredible to me that these people have had such little contact with the outside world — for 5,000 years, minimum, some scientists think they’ve been alone on North Sentinel for 60,000 years.

I think it’s easy to idealize this primitive life. For one thing, these folks are so in tune with their natural surroundings, they appeared unharmed and unfazed when the tsunami destroyed so much in 2004. It is speculated that the Sentinelese were tipped off to the coming tsunami by something they alone would see in the waves that lap their shores. (The helicopter which took this picture was there to check and see if they were okay after the tsunami). So the language they speak with the waves and sky, the fish and trees, has a vocabulary for that. It’s also easy to idealize our technology-heavy culture. We have ships, and helicopters. We must seem to them as though aliens from another world had come to visit, perhaps to abduct them for horrible scientific procedures. Or perhaps we seem like demons. In any case, our technology doesn’t protect us from tsunamis.

The most notable thing is not whether living the Stone-Age vida loca is some sort of paradise on earth without knowledge of kindling, or whether these folks would be better off reading my blog on their Kindles. The most notable thing is their fear. Whatever else isolation has given them or taken away, they are afraid. Always afraid. Afraid in every recorded encounter. Isolation breeds fear. You don’t want to live a life of fear? Stop isolating yourself.

Double Book Review: Race in the USA

The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis: humongous poor black kid in Memphis taken in by rich white family becomes NFL player, not without trouble.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the story has to do with the psychological and learning ability evaluation Michael Oher was given at age 18. After the age of 16 his academic efforts moved his IQ from 80 to 110. In other words, he moved from the have nots to the haves. After age 15. Also, I learned that he is very big and strong. The social implications of this story are more interesting than the sports story.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Race and education levels in Baltimore. When a woman dies in 1951, her cells are already reproducing in labs around the country – a huge scientific breakthrough. It leads to the invention of the polio vaccine and much more. But her family doesn’t know what’s happened with her cells for over 20 years. Communication issues leave this family confused about what’s happened to their mother for fifty years.

Both books are bestsellers. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a must-read for those who want to understand race relations. The Blind Side is a good book too, but is going to appeal to football fans more.

What’s the real value of Ten Bucks?

When I left in 1988, Congo was called Zaire, as was the river and the unit of currency. The zaires were practically worthless in ’88, but it got even worse in the 1990s.

Now, what the Congolese want is the American dollar. Well, mostly. I’m told that as a foreigner I’ll be expected to pay with VERY crisp bills. In Kinshasa, when you’re buying something that costs $5 or more, people want the good old buck. But nobody’s interested in one-dollar bills. That’s what the Congolese franc is for. I suspect that this is one way they protect their own currency from inflation. I doubt it’s policy — unless you call street value “policy”. And it is! In fact, we Americans forget so easily that a dollar does have street value, even here. We judge that street value every day when we wake up, as long as we work, sell products or services (if you work for an employer, you sell your service) and buy stuff we are judging the street value of a dollar.

I suspect that this is how people have adjusted to keep their currency from running away and hiding. Congo, one of the poorest countries, ranking all the way up at #4 on the Fragile States Index from the Fund for Peace, one of the five countries listed as “Very High Alert.” The Congolese, it appears, not only want American dollars they can trust, but they want crisp ones.

I’m told from a credible source (he was there earlier this year) that a $10 bill with a tear may only be worth $7-8. A very beat up one perhaps less. In a strange way, it makes sense. The dollar isn’t printed there, and it’s pretty hard to come up with new bills. Every time they get handled, they lose a little value. Think of it like paying for something with a car. You drive it for a few days, maybe it’s worth the same. But if you dent the fender, it might not be. The dollar used to be a piece of paper that could stand in for gold; now, a dollar stands in for a piece of paper. And newly minted paper is best. Another way to look at it is like a baseball card or any other collector’s item that’s preferred in mint condition.

Strange as it may be, I’ll be carrying the crispest bills my credit union can find. No ones, only fives, tens and twenties. I’ll be able to exchange a ten or twenty for Congolese francs on the street. They trade at about 920:1.

Weird stories involving currency: in April, a drunk Australian offered me 50 Euros for $50 cash (the Euros would get me probably $90 at my bank). Nobody wanted him to drink any more, so he wasn’t able to swing the deal. Bank value of 50 Euros, $90 (or so) and Street Value, when we don’t want an even drunker drunk on our flight makes $50 US Cash … wait for it … priceless.

Weird story 2: hearsay only! Can’t find an article online to support it! I heard about 10 years ago that the currency in Bangladesh had devalued so much that the beggars went on strike. What? That’s right. Muslims and some Hindus as well have a daily requirement to give Alms as a religious duty. They support an entire class of people: the beggars. In Bangladesh there was a standard amount (for example, $1). But that standard amount (based on percentages, if you ask enough people in the course of the day, you will earn a certain amount begging, just like selling credit card processing in the USA) was no longer enough to feed the beggars’ families, so the entire caste went on strike. People could no longer do their religious duty! It resulted in a national crisis and the president had to tell the entire nation that the standard amount was changing. You know your currency is being judged on Street value when the beggars strike!

How I get my Hedgerow Time

I wouldn’t be able to complete my next book without significant time in the hedgerows. To and from my local coffeehouse, or the bank, I can walk instead of drive. Often times when I walk I arrive with better thoughts to write down quickly; instead of spending eight hours in a day typing, I have to get out and move for a while.

The thinking isn’t done directly. My hedgerows, which are often just alleyways in a mid-sized Midwestern town, don’t have blackberries growing. Instead, I pick aluminum cans. Taleb points out the irony of having a valet carry your suitcases to the hotel room, and later lifting weights in the hotel’s exercise room.

Like Taleb, I cannot see the value in paying for a gym membership. Supposedly they motivate you to work out more often since you’ve committed your dollars, but this doesn’t always work for people and ends up being a profit center for the gym. Instead, I get paid to exercise and think. When I walk I pick up aluminum cans. Perhaps I look as though I’m a bum, picking up other’s trash, but there are several benefits to this method. First, of course I can cash in the cans after I accumulate quite a few, and this helps fund my non-profit’s travel budget. Second, I beautify my city. Third, like blackberries or other delicacies one might hope to find, it gives me something to keep my eyes peeled for. There’s something fun in finding that can and scooping it into my bag.

In some ways, I’m combining exercise, thinking time (space I need to be able to be creative later), cleaning up my town, and there’s even a little compensation for it.

The point is, you may not live in rural England, with its beautiful hedges and idyllic scenery. Your town may be noisy, your streets may be dirty, but practicing hedgerows is really getting yourself in shape to go to the edge of the world.

They aren’t the same thing. I think that, like Xi in The Gods Must Be Crazy, our walking may take us to the edge of the world:

Xi was angry with the gods. He shouted, “Take back your thing! We don`t want it! Look at the trouble it brought. “

The gods did not take it back.

He shouted, “You must be crazy to send us this thing! Take it back!“
Then he shouted, “Look out! Look out!“

But he spoke too late and the thing felled his daughter Dani.
Xi carried the thing away from the shelter and buried it.
That evening, there was no laughter and no chatter around the family fire.
A strange feeling of shame had come over the family…and they were very quiet.
Xi said, “I have buried the thing. It will not make us unhappy again. “
That night, a hyena smelled the blood on the thing, and dug it up.
A bad-tempered warthog chased the hyena away and it dropped the thing.
The next day, Dani found it. Her brother Toma heard her playing on it and said, “Let me try. Let me try too. “
That night the family was very unhappy. They began to talk about this thing. They did not have a name for it. They called it the “evil thing. “
Gaboo said, “Perhaps the gods were absent-minded… when they dropped the evil thing on the earth.
They`ve always sent only good things, like rain, trees, roots and berries to eat.
We are their children and they love us. But now they`ve sent this evil thing. “
Xi said, “The thing does not belong on the earth. Tomorrow I will take it to the end
of the earth and throw it off. “
Gobo said, “I think the end of the earth must be very far. I think you`ll have to walk for 20 days. Perhaps 40. “
Xi said, “I will start walking tomorrow. “

It is much harder to find the edge of the world when we haven’t been walking down the hedgerows. Will you start walking tomorrow?

Check the archives for more content on the hedgerows idea.

Eephus ain’t nothing

A Philosophy of Listening

Carpe diem

One day I think in 2010 while I was volunteering at a local soup kitchen, I walked past a bookshelf full of romance novels. Serendipity means finding a book worth reading on a shelf full of romances. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable was sitting there. I’d never heard of it before, but even the way the spine is designed said “this is not a romance novel.” So I seized the day, plucked it from the shelf, took it home, and began to read philosophy again.

In fact, I had read Why Art Cannot Be Taught by Elkins a few years before but perhaps didn’t see it as the philosophical book that it is. But the point is, since graduating college I hadn’t really engaged my brain that way. Once I read The Black Swan I had to admit to myself I was reading stuff that was a bit over my head, and from there I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and so on. I began again to engage philosophy, this time in a much more serious way than I had during my undergrad years. You don’t have to have a graduate program to make yourself read.

My basic conclusion after reading Why Art Cannot Be Taught was that Elkins was correct in saying that Art cannot be taught, but incorrect in failing to offer a more excellent way to engage with art students. Coaching, I believed, and a community of authentic relationship, may not teach anyone to become a “great” artist as defined by fame or wealth. But it could help artists to become better people, more well-adjusted, less prone to isolation and even to suicide or self-medication – things which have been known to destroy artists in their prime. If you want to become an artful motivational listener, that is, if you want to listen to people and watch them walk away and succeed at attaining goals and dreams, this is a science to some extent which can be studied like the science of mixing color. Just because you can mix red and yellow to get orange doesn’t mean you can move people. Just because you can ask powerful questions, like “What do you hope to get out of this session” doesn’t mean you’re going to become the most famous or wealthy coach. But then, this isn’t necessarily the end of an art-form like listening. As Ronald Reagan said (or repeated) “There’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

Perhaps the first thing we have to lay down to learn this art is the idea that it will somehow become a great career and that it might make us famous. (Incidentally the same goes for writing. You have to come to the place where you don’t care how much money it makes or how famous you will become – you simply have an idea or story to tell. Then you become productive.)

One of the biggest philosophical questions of all time is this: What is Truth?

As a motivational listener, you’ll be listening for that too. But not so much in the way of a judge or lawyer in a courtroom. Instead, you’re listening for the truth like a hunting guide looks for bear or cougar spoor. Yep, the old biologist’s joke is true: bear spoor happens. The real value of being a hunting guide is in recognizing the unexpected for what it is. If you were teaching people to hunt for deer in northern Indiana, where I live, you’d think it’s not so difficult to avoid the danger of becoming prey. But there have been stories in the area of bears visiting from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Some years ago, perhaps around 2007, I was working in Ohio and saw a newspaper article discussing the fact that several people had spotted a cougar in their backyards. A representative of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources was quoted as saying “there are no cougars in Ohio.” Now there are many current articles about cougars in Ohio woodlands. As unusual and unexpected as they may be, you would do well to recognize the signs of this animal in your vicinity – and to be able to say to yourself the first time it happens, “I know there are no cougars, but here is a cougar,” and to take appropriate action. Being able to recognize something which is highly improbable is a key component, possibility as a critical piece of truth, that takes awareness and alertness that’s worth paying for.

On the flip side there are things we may uncover as we track that could help, as we listen to people’s story, which could lead to discovery of something spectacular, perhaps even resulting in some sort of breakthrough, and dare we say, greatness. To continue with the hunting guide analogy, knowing how to find not just any buck, but the twenty-point buck; to not just locate the hole where any northern pike are hiding, but to catch a record fish.

So, the art of motivational listening, like any other art, perhaps cannot be taught. But there is one thing I can tell you: you are looking for something you do not know. This is the core idea behind Taleb’s Black Swan. The Black Swan event is “an outlier, as it lies outside the real of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Secondly, it carries an extreme impact… Third, in spite of its outlier statues, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurance after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. … It Is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks… Black Swan Logic makes what you don’t know far more relevant than what you do know. Consider that many Black Swans can be caused and exacerbated by their being unexpected.”

This is what we’re looking for when we listen. Where are the handful of shocks, positive or negative? To refer to an earlier essay where I discussed the nature of the knuckleball, say for example that you are the batter, and the knuckleball pitcher makes a mistake. He throws a pitch that rotates, and the ball, rather than knuckling impossibly, suddenly becomes very hittable. The only problem is that you may be so surprised by the relative ease that you miss the pitch anyway.

Another pitch, even more rare than the poorly-thrown knuckleball, relies on the surprise. This pitch, called an eephus pitch, is served up to the batter in such a way that it is intended to be so hittable that the batter misses.

Wikipedia notes: “The delivery from the pitcher has very low velocity and usually catches the hitter off-guard. Its invention is attributed to Rip Sewell of the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1940s. According to manager Frankie Frisch, the pitch was named by outfielder Maurice Van Robays. When asked what it meant, Van Robays replied, “‘Eephus ain’t nothing, and that’s a nothing pitch.” Although the origin is not known for certain, Eephus may come from the Hebrew word אפס (pronounced “EFF-ess”), meaning “nothing“.[2]” 

The Eephus pitch must be used with terrible infrequency – a complete outlier. The minute it becomes expected, it becomes worthless. It’s no longer a Black Swan Event. Sometimes it’s called a ball, sometimes a strike, usually makes the batter laugh, fools even the umpire, and once, Ted Williams hit a home run in the All-Star Game on an eephus pitch. Ted Williams was the kind of batter who was always ready. Ted was one of the greats.

Greatness, in terms of “no limits to what may be accomplished” is often the result of flexibly and appropriately responding to a Black Swan event when it happens. It means the ability to recognize bear or cougar spoor and get out of the woods, or being ready for the eephus pitch, that moment in which things become so easy for you to knock it out of the park that you’re likely to completely miss your chance. I think the worst thing we could do when we see the eephus pitch coming is to freeze. Better to swing away and miss than not to try at all; as Shakespeare famously said, “Better to have loved and lost than never to love at all.”

The issue becomes one of preparation. How do you seize the day if you aren’t awake? Again, the quest for not only the truth of what is now, but the truth of what might be possible even if it has never been done, seen, or thought of, is where greatness exists, and yes, it’s improbable.

All the more reason to be on the lookout for it.

Trip to Congo: Decision is YES

Around 200 Congolese delegates from Kinshasa were preparing to attend Mennonite World Conference in Harrisburg, PA in July. Each of them needed to come up with $160 for a visa application (not a small amount for Kinois) and needed to have an interview at the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa. An agent was hired to guide them through the application and interview process, (what to say, what not to say in this interview) and he was entrusted with the money. Eventually, the agent told the entire group that their interview was set for a certain day; when the group arrived at the embassy, however, they were told the embassy knew nothing about them. The agent had absconded with the money. There would not be another opening for interviews at the U.S. Embassy until well after the conference. Our brothers and sisters from Congo got screwed by the agent, who took off with the money to Brazzaville, on the other side of the Congo River. All but a small handful of the original delegates were unable to attend.

This is a sad story. On all my trips to Africa, I’ve always heard the same thing: please don’t forget us! I can’t forget these brothers and sisters, and I’ve decided that whatever the score may be on my fundraising at the moment, it’s time to buy the tickets for September. I didn’t have a plan B for that month anyway. I’ve applied for my visa. I’ve had my yellow fever booster shot. It’s time to commit.

With just $1400 outstanding need for my budget, I’ve decided to go ahead and purchase tickets for the trip to Congo. I do still need to raise this money for a significant part of my budget needs, but enough has come in that I’m able to purchase tickets. Could something still stop me? Yes, an Ebola outbreak or a violent coup within the next few weeks would change my plans.

Thanks so much to all who have contributed! If you’d still like to donate, go here.

Memory’s Patina

In courtroom psychology, where facts are king, memory has been shown to be one of the more unreliable tools for discovery. Each time we recall an event, our brains add to or subtract from the experience, creating a patina, adding layers of varnish or grime so that while the antique table of our memories looks less and less like it did the day that memory was made, we only recognize it years later as the shiny antique we now see.

If an ancient memory is like an antique table, what is the value of stripping it back to its bare facts? For those who love the PBS show Antique Road Show you know that stripping the patina and refinishing a piece of old furniture actually lessens the value of it, but in some cases a painting or piece of furniture can also be restored by an expert, giving it even greater value. In the same way, your memory, coated over with layers, may become less valuable as a tool to illuminate beauty and principle if stripped by confrontation with the basic facts; as if it were a pearl stripped back to the initial grain which irritated the oyster. On the other hand, the idea of “cleaning or restoring” corresponds to the idea that we might take that memory and distill from it the underlying principle, making it elegant again.

We do not want to strip the memory to bare facts, but we do want to highlight the beauty of what we learned from it, what stays with us as evidence of the refining of time which makes it more valuable. It isn’t the wood of the table (though it may be from an extinct tree such as the American chestnut – that is the like the last remaining person whose personal memory includes World War One). The beauty is the patina itself, something nobody could create, it’s only made by time.

So. Memories attached to emotions, are one of the most reliable tools for getting at the principles of what impact events have had on the speaker’s life. For example, my memories of Congo are not perhaps factual, (see Congo blogs in archives) but the principles I’ve drawn highlight what was valuable in the experience.

We might even say that the writers of the four Gospels, who waited some thirty years, may not have given us the facts, in the strictest sense, that they might have if they were involved in some sort of daily journalism during the days of Christ. On the other hand, their somewhat delayed picture may be even more valuable for the patina they added; the things they remembered because of how the principles continued to ring true over time come closer to an illumination of the indelible reality Jesus left them with than what a newspaper man might have given us looking at events in real time.

The Listener understands that truth may contain facts, but no true story contains all facts, and therefore a motivational listener is unconcerned with knowing all facts. Long before Christ walked the earth Lao Tzu speaks of the “Myriad things” or “Ten-thousand things” while Solomon ridiculed the quest for all facts “everything under the sun is vanity.” The aim of their poetic philosophy is to uncover principle, not to catalog fact. They realized long before computers existed that nobody would ever be able to collect all facts in one place and that facts were, in fact, relatively superfluous to the discovery and illumination of truth.

The Listener hears stories constructed from Memory knowing that such stories are, as time goes on, scientifically unreliable in terms of factual reconstruction of events, but that the same Memory is remarkably reliable in its able to recall emotions experienced or established during an event. In my recollections of Congo/Zaire 27 years ago, my memory now has such a patina that you should not trust my memory to give you a perfect rendering of the facts. You should be able to trust that the patina on my memory will give you a very accurate rendition of how the events shaped my life. And that is the reality I now live.

Canonized books of story or poetry which have been used as factual sledgehammers cause us discomfort, but their original impact in society was due to their usefulness in the way their story elucidated truth regardless of factuality. The first question to ask when studying canonic texts is not “is this or that a fact?” but rather, “how does this story impact me emotionally? What true principles are here?” If the story should turn out to be factual as well, all the better.

The Listener reads fiction with abandon, uncovering truth wherever it may be found, and reads non-fiction with caution, recognizing that each fact stacked upon another fact could build a tower of Babel; that a large collection of facts twisted for the writer’s profit is less valuable than a single principle uncovering some absolute truth. And so, for example, the books of the Bible, if you take them to be fiction, read them with abandon, and if you read them as non-fiction, read them with caution. When you listen to a companion, encourage their wildest fantasies, let them ride unicorns to the ends of rainbows where they find pots of gold, and take their statements of fact (particularly when remembering facts of long ago) with a grain of salt.

Playing the Blues on Vortex Street

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

John Donne

On the heels of thinking about rivers that move so slowly it’s hard to tell they’re going anywhere, or those lazy spots where everything’s so wide it loses focus, I also see a place where things speed up … in reverse.

In an eddy, liquid spins backwards as it flows past an obstacle.

The old school language for this is backsliding, but the liquid in an eddy will eventually flow downhill with gravity, so this language feels more hopeful. That’s easy when your life is like a river, but what about when mapping your life feels more like oceanography?

Sometimes life feels more like an ocean than a river. Tides slosh us back and forth, and the meteorological systems that accompany and impact our routines are far more complex than the ecosystem of a simple river.  Then there’s the foundational shifting of tectonic plates; in short, life throws so many transitions, changes and complications we easily end up adrift in an ocean when all we hoped for was a ride downstream.

Ocean vortices, also called mesoscale eddies, can sometimes last for months, and cover areas as big as 500 km in diameter.

Even more intriguing is the Karman vortex street, a phenomenon when eddies in a repeating pattern happen on the backside of a blunt object, such as Guadalupe Island, 150 miles west of Baja California. Guadalupe causes a vortex street almost every day from June to August. The alternating eddies formed in a vortex street in the lee of an island take turns in a repeating pattern.

Obstacles that cause regular patterns in our lives can be surreal. Sometimes the obstacles in our lives are permanent and create vortex streets which become part of the landscape. Some days we can ignore them completely because we live with them; other days we have no choice but to acknowledge their existence.

I was talking to Jason (name and story used with permission) last night. Jason routinely places in the top ten in local triathlons, recently he placed 6th in a field of 200+. He once qualified to participate in the Best of US Amateur triathlon and flew from Alaska to Vermont to compete in what turned out to be a pretty exclusive race, with only a handful of male and female qualifiers invited from each state. (He wasn’t one of the top finishers that time, though.) His level fitness comes partly from an incredible work ethic and partly from a diet extremely low in fats because his body can’t handle them. What people don’t see when they watch Jason compete is his chronic familial pancreatitis, with a suspected slow-growing tumor; and he also battles renal cell carcinoma. Jason has undergone multiple surgeries and has been in danger of losing his life. He schedules medical procedures so regularly, he says, “it’s like the way you would schedule with your dentist or eye doctor.” (He tells me that tomorrow, July 22, he has an endoscopy scheduled.) Who knows if he would still be surviving if he didn’t push his body to the limit in training and competition whenever he’s healthy? It gives him the ability to fight when his illness takes over for a period of time.

This condition is Jason’s vortex street. “It’s surreal,” he says, “I’ll place sixth out of more than two hundred in a triathlon, then I’ll come home and there will be a medical bill I have to pay. I don’t feel sick, I feel great.”

The last time he was in the hospital, I went and sat with him for a couple hours, and I cried. I wonder when I will lose some of my closest friends who deal with diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and I treasure the small interactions of our lives; the sharing of a picture of their children on Facebook, a phone call to say “congratulations” for small victories, or “I’m glad you’re feeling better.” If, and ultimately when, we lose these “clods and promontories” as John Donne called them, we will all be the worse. When the bell tolls for them it also tolls for us. We all sing the vortex street blues.

Singing the blues is a simultaneous sharing of woes, while feeling good somehow that a better day will come. My friend Jonathan wrote a song that begins like this:

Better days gonna come again/ put your raincoat on, you’ve been stuck in here too long.

We have to get out. Jason does this better than anyone I know. His body creates one of the most intense vortex streets, a constant drag to the leeward, but his discipline to get his raincoat on and get out is an inspiration.

We often do feel like islands, (and we feel that our own physical selves are that obstacle which causes a vortex street) and yet John Donne insisted, we are not alone, that we must grieve every clod lost to the waves. When our friends are singing the blues on vortex street, our job is not to ignore, but to acknowledge, and to celebrate small victories as we navigate through the eddies. Perhaps worse than the backwards motion of backsliding, like a temporary eddy in a river, is the three-hundred mile wide mesoscale eddy in the ocean, or the vortex street that follows us around like a pair of ribbons streaming behind us, creating drag. The mesoscale eddy or the Karman vortex street are disruptive, regular, and part of the ocean that picks away at our continent.

What’s am I listening looking for? What’s the value of recognizing a vortex street in a friend’s life?  Look for ways to find inspiration from someone’s efforts and then highlight it. Invite people to get their raincoat on and get out.  See people in poverty rehearse and perform a symphony in spite of it. When you see people in pain who compete in spite of it, share each others’ stories (with permission!) and be aware that some of us live with permanent obstacles. The vortex street comes from permanent obstacles, difficult surroundings, but it leaves a trail of beauty if we’ll only look for it.