Last weekend, on the way home from giving a presentation/workshop to a hospital foundation in California, I found myself in LAX with a little time to kill and nothing to read on the six hour flight home. I wandered into a newsstand and looked at the magazines on the shelf (it was a Sunday, meaning all the newspapers were way too heavy to lug around).
A cover blurb on the October 2013 issue of Harper’s magazine highlighted an article on “The Survival of Magazines,” but I tend to stay away from those kinds of articles, because they’re all doom and gloom. A glance at the table of contents, however, listed a piece called “Content and its Discontents” by Patrick de St. Exupery.
In my view, anything by a St. Exupery is at least worth a glance–Patrick is the first cousin, twice removed, of the famous Antoine de St. Exupery who wrote, among other classics, The Little Prince. So I bought the magazine.
It turns out that the two articles, taken together, made the $6.99 purchase price of the magazine well, well worth it. In fact, that was the point of John McArthur, Harper’s publisher, who wrote the piece on the survival of magazines. He talked about the old advertising-based economic model of magazines, the onset of the internet, and the unfortunate transformation of literary talent and complex thoughts into, as he said, “something called content.” [click to continue…]
As the travel and vacation season kicks off, a thought or two on the types of travel and its rewards seemed appropriate. So … here goes.
Over Memorial Day Weekend, the New York Times ran a piece about the evolution of luxury vacation travel–and how much those privileged travelers are missing out on, by being shielded from the discomfort of the “everyman’s” travel experience. Tony Perrottet, who wrote the piece, argued that Epictetus, the first-century Stoic philosopher, had himself argued that “a certain degree of physical discomfort was an integral part of a rich experience on the road.”
To which I would respond … it depends upon what kind of experience you are seeking. In my Surviving Uncertainty book, I differentiate between vacation and adventure. (To wit: if you know how everything is going to turn out, it’s a vacation, not an adventure. Conversely, if a vacation goes so badly awry that the outcome is suddenly not so certain, it has ceased to be a vacation and has morphed into an adventure). Likewise, I think there is a difference between a vacationer and a traveler.
Not everyone who travels is a traveler, except according to the most technical of definitions. A traveler–at least in the Lane Wallace worldview dictionary, which, granted, is not quite as well known as Webster’s–is someone who leaves their home/comfort zone to explore and seek out new cultures, experiences, and/or sensations. A traveler wants to know what the souk in Marrakesh smells, looks and feels like, even if one visit is perhaps enough for a lifetime. They are seeking, as Epictetus put it, “a rich experience on the road.”
A vacationer, on the other hand, is looking primarily for a refuge. When I want to expand my understanding of the world, I go to Africa. I sleep in mud huts, go without coffee, sleep, running water, and eat whatever makes the hunger pangs stop. I connect as much as I can with local cultures and people, taking notes the whole time. But important to note is that I do all that because I am seeking a rich experience. I don’t expect it to be fun, necessarily, as much as I expect it to be rewarding. And comfort–as I’ve often said about adventure–is rarely part of the equation. [click to continue…]
My mom (who is living with us at the moment) has been a Rotary Club member since 1987. So we now get “Rotarian” magazine delivered to the house on a regular basis. Normally, I don’t pay much attention. But the cover story of the January issue was titled “Wake Up and Live Your Dreams!” Seemed apropos. I opened it up to find an article titled: “The Rewards of Risk: What’s the Greatest Threat to the Pursuit of Happiness? Doing Nothing.”
So of course, I had to read it. The intro, written by a a travel writer named Frank Bures, talked about how disproportionate many of our fears are, and how our fears can be stifling, or even paralyzing.
“We live in the world our great-grandparents dreamed of,” he wrote, “yet we seem incapable of enjoying it, unable to let go of those handrails, ever more afraid of the unknown.” He also noted that some of the things that exhilarate us are exhilarating not despite the risk involved, but because of it. So, Bures concluded, “not taking risks along the way is the biggest risk of all.”
I have somewhat mixed feelings about that. I completely agree that to live ruled by fear is not to live. And there are certainly those who are motivated and rewarded by the very risks (and attendant adrenaline rush) that come with experiences like skydiving, flying, mountain climbing, being a war correspondent and the like.
There are others, of course, who accept the risks of adventure only because they want a particular goal or experience badly enough to take the risks as part of a trade off; who want to know, for example, the feeling of being on top of a glacier-covered mountain, or to understand first-hand how post-Genocide Rwandan women put their lives back together. They decide to take on the risks involved in those adventures but don’t necessarily get any sense of exhilaration out of the risk. For them, the risk is more like the price exacted for something greater in reward.
But regardless of how different people view the risks inherent in the pursuit of passions, dreams, or adventure, the point is still well taken: life is short, and to shrink back in fear from pursuing the joys or dreams or experiences that offer fulfillment, meaning, or make you feel alive is an awful waste.
On the other hand, it’s not always fear that leads someone to pause or choose another path than one most fulfilling to themselves. And sometimes that point gets lost in our enthusiasm for self-fulfillment and life lived to the fullest. [click to continue…]
Well, this post was supposed to come out in early January, when the title might have been more appropriate. But six weeks later, I am only now beginning to pull my head above water every now and then to notice what year it is.
For those who read my last couple of posts–a quick update: my mom survived, although she spent 3 months in the hospital. And since my parents clearly need help now, I spent December and January clearing out their house in New York and moving the two of them in with us in Massachusetts. My dad clearly has dementia setting in, which is tough tough tough. And my mom is weak and overwhelmed, using a walker, needing a lot of help, but at least basically healthy now. Still working on fixing up their New York house for sale, establishing a new network of care and medical resources for them here, cooking and cleaning for 5, and balancing three generations of strong and very different personalities under one roof (with very mixed results). And lest we think we were almost out of the woods, my husband is now facing difficult knee replacement and reconstruction surgery at the beginning of March.
As I’ve often said, one of the goals of this website is to provide inspiration for people contemplating or going through planned or unplanned adventures. So I hope the above summary makes at least most of you feel better about your own lives, just by comparison. And if it doesn’t, because you’re going through a stretch just as tough or tougher … at least take comfort that you’re not alone in the swamp.
Indeed, I’ve been amazed, the past few months, at how much company I really do have. I dislocated my wrist jumping out of bed to chase down my dad in the early hours of one morning, soon after my mom went into the hospital. And due to the amount of caretaking, packing, clearing out, cleaning, moving, and such I’ve been doing since then, the soft tissue damage still hasn’t healed. So I’ve had a brace on my right forearm and hand for the past 15 weeks. It leads to interesting conversations at grocery stores and other places where I now need to ask for help. [click to continue…]
I have a stack of articles and subjects sitting in a folder waiting for me to write something about them on this site, but one in particular seemed most appropriate today, seeing as we are now officially in the Holiday Season, when thoughts turn to the North Pole more often than at other times of the year … and also because its content resonated so strongly with to the events and turns of my own life at the moment.
The article is an interview about leadership with Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and current professor at Harvard University. The article appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Rotman Magazine (a publication of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, which almost always has some thought-provoking and worthwhile articles in it).
In 2007, George co-wrote a book on leadership called True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership. I haven’t read the book itself, just the interview in which George talked about the book. So I can’t speak to the quality of the book, one way or another.
Having said that, however, the basic concept that drives the book seems like a worthy and important idea to ponder. It’s not a particularly complex thought; it’s simply that deep success, satisfaction and–not coincidentally–great leadership, comes from being a well-integrated, authentic human being whose actions are aligned with what he or she feels is most important. Or, as George puts it, from finding and following your own sense of “True North.”
In some senses, Professor George’s concept of “True North” is a lot like following a passion, except that it’s possible to follow a passion and still not be a well-integrated, authentic human being in or across the rest of your life. So I think being guided by a sense of True North means something more inclusive and holistic than simply following what ignites your passion. Especially because–at least in the interview–George does not present finding and following that path as an easy, “seven successful habits” or “3 easy steps” process.
“Discovering your True North takes a lifetime of commitment and learning,” George says. “Each day, as you are tested in the world, you have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and respect the person you see and the life you are leading. Of course, some days are better than others, but as long as you are true to who you are, you can cope with the most difficult circumstances that life presents.”
This sentiment rings particularly true to me at the moment. When things are good and easy, with no crises or hard hits to manage, the choices life throws at you are much easier, because it’s possible to have several things you like or that matter to you at one time. When that sense of true self really matters is when things are bad, or really hard, and you can’t have everything–or even what you thought were some of the basic components–anymore. If you have to make really hard choices about what stays, and what you have to let go of, the only thing that allows you to make that choice and live with it is that sense of integrated clarity about what is most important. [click to continue…]
In the midst of the continuing medical crises that have inundated my family this fall (see my last post for the first; this past month it’s been an emergency hospitalization of my mother that’s had me in NY for all but one week–I think a post on “emergency adventure” might be in the offing …), I caught a piece in The New York Times Sunday Business section that really, really needs addressing in this space.
The piece, written by a very young Georgetown computer science professor named Cal Newport, is titled “Follow a Passion? Let it Follow You.” He argues–much as some marriage counselors do–that passion, like love, follows a solid foundation of a job (or relationship) that has certain positive traits. Those traits, he says (pulling from Daniel Pink’s book Drive,) include “a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world.” And, he argues, you can find those traits just about anywhere.
Looking for a passion, he says … or, as he puts it, the “Cult of Passion” …puts undue pressure on young people to “pick” the right thing, and make the “right” decision, worried that the wrong choice will screw up your chances of happiness. What’s more, he argues that following passion may lead a person to suffer from constant doubt, anxiety and “chronic job hopping.” So instead of asking “what is this job offering me?” he counsels young people to look instead at “what am I offering this job?”
I have at least three different reactions competing noisily in my head for first dibs responding. But I’ll start with the most compassionate one. I felt sad, reading the piece, that Mr. Newport got such terrible counseling in his school days that somehow led him to see a desire to feel passionate about your path in life is somehow a point of pressure, anxiety, and unhappiness. Perhaps there is another book I need to write, to make this point more clearly, but the search for a path with heart or passion isn’t one made from a sitting position, choosing door A, B, or C and hoping you pick right and that you like what’s behind it.
There may be a few people who know, from the exploration they’ve done in their lives up to the age of 18, exactly and precisely what turns them on and ignites the fire of passion within them. They are, of course, the radical minority, and a number of them will still find themselves taking a new direction somewhere down the line. Most of us have to try a few things before one makes them feel as if they’ve come “home.” I was 28 before I found a job that felt like that. But the key point about passion is that it isn’t something you “decide” to follow, any more than you “decide” your heart hurts or your stomach is starving. When something resonates passionately with you, from the inside out, regardless of external rewards or status it offers, you know it.
Ah. But how do you find that, if you don’t inherently already feel it? Therein lies the step that Mr. Newport is missing, or perhaps doesn’t want to take. Reading Mr. Newport’s essay, it struck me that he might not be someone comfortable with periods of uncertain exploration. He wanted a path out of college that would be “the one”–just as many young people (particularly women) want to instantly find the romantic equivalent of “the one.” Unfortunately, life doesn’t generally work that way.
There is a bit of exploring required in the course of both romantic and professional life, to figure out what resonates with you inside and lights that fire. Most people really do end up stumbling upon paths (and relationships) that prove passion-filled. You can narrow that search by doing some hard inner searching of what you like, what things come easily to you, what kind of work situations make you happy, how tolerant of financial and physical risk you are, and so forth, and keeping those in mind when evaluating potential job offers. And that analytical assessment is important to keep the search grounded in elements that really do matter to you.
Of course, at the age of 22, just out of college, you have very little real life experience to compare to or go on. So the task at that age, if you’re one of the vast majority who hasn’t already stumbled upon a life’s passion, should be to explore the world and try to gain as broad a range of experiences as possible, to increase your chances of finding something that really resonates with you. [click to continue…]
I‘ve been a bit lax in posting to the site, the past month or so. So apologies for that. But it’s because I’ve been busy getting a serious, multi-level, first-hand refresher course in the gifts and challenges of what I call “unplanned adventure.”
As anyone who’s read anything on this blog knows by now, I’m a huge advocate of adventure, even when it isn’t comfortable. I also believe that adventure can be worthwhile, even when it isn’t planned. But while planned and unplanned adventure may both entail uncharted terrain, unplanned adventure is generally tougher to navigate, because you aren’t a willing participant in it. There you are, heading to the store for a quart of milk, and WHAM! Life blindsides you with a whallop that transports you, unprepared and against your will, into the middle of a harsh and foreign wilderness, with no suggestions as to how to navigate through it, or even what to do next.
Generally speaking, unplanned adventure also tends to be caused by … well … something bad. Rarely do you start out for work and find yourself suddenly rich and famous, unsure how to navigate your new celebrity status. Usually, unplanned adventure involves some kind of sudden, unexpected, and painful turn of events: a death or accident in the family, a life-altering illness or injury, the loss of a job, the discovery of a cheating spouse, the end of a marriage, economic collapse, or some other event that crumbles the foundations of something really important in our lives, casting us–at least temporarily–adrift, in one way or another. The way back is blocked, and we have to find a new way home, or forward.
So it was, a little over a month ago, that I walked in the house with fresh fish to make a special dinner and picked up the ringing phone to hear my husband Ed tell me that his older son, who’d just finished a degree at the Culinary Institute of America and had gotten a job as a chef in Louisville, Kentucky, had been hit by a car while riding his bike to work. The hospital hadn’t been specific about how bad the injuries were, just that he was about to go into surgery, they were projecting a 5-6 week hospital stay, and that Ed might want to think about getting down there.
So quickly, life turns. And so much worse, if it involves the life of your child.
There is no manual to tell you how to help a spouse deal with that kind of traumatic event. Or how to navigate the uncharted terrain and minefields that follow. And yes, I recognize the irony of that statement, given that I’ve actually written a bit of a manual on navigating uncharted landscapes: my Surviving Uncertainty book (Now available in paperback through this website, soon to be available in electronic formats, as well).
Of course, even in that book, I note that nobody else can really tell you how to navigate your own challenging hero’s journey. Others (like me) can offer some general advice and the benefit of whatever lessons and insights we’ve gained from our own crossings. But each hero’s journey is unique. What’s more, the rewards of the journey come from figuring the way out yourself. But Surviving Uncertainty also focuses on coping more effectively with planned or unplanned uncertainty when the primary adventure is happening to you. Being the supporter on the sidelines while other family members bear the primary burden of navigating those waters is, in some ways, tougher than doing it yourself. And it requires a lot more finesse. [click to continue…]
I have a particular soft spot for famed New Yorker writer John McPhee. He is, of course, an inspired writer of environmental and outdoor adventure pieces, and a skilled writer of human profile sketches. But the mention of his name is also a reminder to me never to make assumptions about people or places, which is a good lesson to carry around in your back pocket.
For me, you see, John McPhee will always bring to mind images of a tiny town in coastal Alaska by the name of Yakutat. I don’t even know that McPhee ever even visited the place. If I had to take odds, in fact, I’d say he probably didn’t. Yakutat is tucked into the coastline about halfway between Sitka and Anchorage, has a grand total of 800 people living there. It also has a road system that goes exactly one mile out of town before coming to an abrupt halt on the far side of a bridge built by residents obviously hopeful of something a little bigger. Everything in Yakutat has to be brought in by plane or boat, and the local industry pretty much consists of fishing or canning, although the locals are trying to get some tourism to take root there.
It’s a town very much like the one profiled in the television show Northern Exposure, except maybe a little smaller. It’s very dark in the winter, and the coastal rain and fog are prodigious. So when I arrived to do an article on the salmon fishing industry there, I took one look and summed it up as a hick town in the middle of nowhere. Pretty, to be sure, but undoubtedly bereft of culture or intellectual stimulation.
One of the fishermen I interviewed there, who was thinking of trading in his fishing boat for a tourist boat because a combination of factors had driven salmon prices down too far to make a profit anymore, took me out in his outboard runabout boat to show me a bit of what the area had to offer. As we scooted across Yakutat Bay, he asked me what magazines I wrote for. I listed several, including, I said, ” a couple of New York magazines.” (I was writing pieces for ForbesLife and Elite Traveler magazines at that time).
“Did you say you wrote for The New Yorker?” he asked. I was a little taken aback that he even knew of the publication. No, I told him, just a couple of magazines based in New York.
“Ah,” he said with a thoughtful nod. “Because, you know, I love John McPhee’s writing there. Have you ever read any of his stuff?”
In all of my world travels, that moment remains one of my favorites of unexpected discovery; one of those times you are forced to completely re-evaluate a person or situation and remind yourself to be a little less sure of yourself in the future. There I was in a dirty, working skiff of a blue-collar fisherman, skimming across a remote bay in Alaska, discussing literature and articles from the elite New Yorker magazine with the liveliest of intellectual companions. It was surreal, it was wonderful, and shame on me for assuming, even if it was unconsciously, that one could only be a fisherman OR a purveyor of great writing and ideas. So since then, I have held John McPhee in special esteem for unwittingly teaching me an important and humbling caution and lesson about what I allow myself to assume. [click to continue…]
One of the consequences of my over-filled life, these days, is that while I subscribe to several publications filled with thought-provoking material, I often don’t get around to reading that material until several weeks (or months) after it’s originally published. This reduces my ability to contribute to the instant-media “buzz” of any given article or issue, of course. On the other hand, it often saves me some time, because by the time I get around to reading about some supposedly “hot” topics or predictions of doom, they’ve already proven irrelevant, untrue, or have been overtaken by events, as they say. Reading magazines six months after the fact certainly does pare down the number of articles you actually have to pay attention to.
So on a recent trip, I found myself reading through the November 14th issue of the New Yorker. (And yes, that would be November, 2011.) I found I could skim right past the articles on Herman Cain and Jon Huntsman’s primary prospects, but I found one on Steve Jobs and innovation that was still fresh–even if I disagreed with the author’s conclusion.
The article, called “The Tweaker,” was written by Malcolm Gladwell–a man I consider a good writer but a somewhat more flawed, and often more shallow, thinker. The article’s point was that Steve Jobs, especially as portrayed by his biographer, Walter Isaacson, was skilled not at coming up with entirely new ideas, but at “tweaking” existing products and technologies to make them better.
Not that Gladwell was dissing the value of tweakers. The article listed a whole string of tweakers throughout history who, among other things, made the industrial revolution possible. And nobody would argue that Jobs was a perfect man or visionary. But in comparing Jobs with Bill Gates, Gladwell concluded that “Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’ vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.”
That made me think. Is it really so much “grander” to imagine contributing your money to world causes than to imagine and build a brilliant desktop publishing system, or an iPhone instead of just a better iPod or MP3 player? What makes one vision “grand” or somehow greater than another? Is Bill Gates the greater visionary simply because his philanthropy was on a grand scale? And how DO we judge the quality or grandness of a person’s vision? Is it on the scope of its impact? The size of the challenge? [click to continue…]
Ed Note: “I Do This Because …” is a series of guest essays on this site by adventurers, entrepreneurs, and brave explorers of experience, uncharted territory, and life. As the title indicates, the essays offer the authors’ reflections on why they chose the path they did, and why they continue on that path, despite all the challenges, costs, and discouraging moments that come with any uncharted adventure.
For more information on the origins of the “I Do This Because” essays, see my own entry. And, as always, if you know of anyone you think would make a good guest essayist, or have your own answer to why you’re pursuing the particular, challenging path you’re pursuing, please share it!
About the Author
Milli Chennell is a volunteer Peace Corps worker who is just finishing up two years of living in a small village on the island of Fiji, in the South Pacific. That might sound like paradise but, as she relates, working in a poor village on Fiji is a very different experience than staying in a beach resort. However, this is not the first experience Milli has had, living outside the United States. She was raised in McMinnville, Oregon and got her commercial pilot’s license there, but she lived in Germany as a child, lived in Costa Rica following college, and then spent 15 months teaching English in Japan. Before joining the Peace Corps, she’d worked as a caterer, chef, waitress, tutor, teaching assistant, airplane mechanic, and watershed manager.
“I could probably be described as having a wanderlust, rather than a thirst for adventure,” she says–although anyone following a passion for wandering and exploring the world is almost guaranteed to find adventure, whether they’re looking for it or not.
What will she do when she leaves Fiji next month? She says she’s interested in solving environmental problems and working in international development. But really, she says, what’s next, at this point, is … “The Unknown.”
Her adventures, in other words, are far from over.
For more information on Milli and her work and life in Fiji–including some great photos–visit her blog.
I Do This Because …
…of smiles.
Of children understanding.
Of women excited to do something for themselves.
Of youths thanking me for an opportunity.
Of officials knowing someone is helping these people, too.
Of expats who are amazed by our dedication and perseverance.
Of men who know change has to come.
Of people who will remember me for helping.
Of Americans who don’t have the courage, or opportunity but wish they did
Of the world that needs people to understand one another
And because if I didn’t, I would have failed my own commitment to myself and to everyone else I’ve helped show that there is another way; that they can do it, that they are cared for and that there is someone willing to do the hard jobs.
This morning, like many of you, I woke up, had breakfast, fit in a workout, cleaned up and went to work. [click to continue…]
