Update on Lives in a Basket

Update on yesterday's post:

A friend who is an even bigger history nerd than I am did a little research on the Alexander family.

-The 1880 census shows Harry, aged 10 and his brother Alfred (Fred) living with their mother Lucetta (Lou), their grandmother, and two aunts. No address is given.

-The 1900 census shows Harry and Clara living at 148 S. 10 Street (their home, I believe was demolished by the City of Noblesville for their City Hall parking lot) with two children, Trent, listed as a 2-year-old son, and Ruth, a 1-month-old daughter. They had a live-in housekeeper. Harry is noted as an attorney.

-The 1910 census confuses things a bit. It shows Harry and Clara living at 154 S. 10th (also now demolished, I think) with 3 children. Harry's career is still law. This time their oldest child Trent is listed as a daughter, aged 12, Ruth was 9 and a third child, Joseph is aged 3. A fourth child that had died is also referenced. Strangely - a family with the exact same names are listed as living with Harry's mother Lou, and his brother Fred at 201 S. 10th.

-The 1920 census shows a Harry, Clara, Trent, Ruth, and Joseph Alexander living in Dane County, Wisconsin. It notes Harry as a traveling salesman.

-From 1920 to 1930, Lou lived alone on S. 10th St. She was 85 years old in 1930.

Lives In A Baseket

The best tings about being known as a local history nerd is that people bring me old stuff.

One day in the winter 2003 I got a call from the secretary at my office. She was confused and concerned. Someone I’d never met had presented themselves at the front desk and left a soot-covered bushel basket, asking that she give it to me, saying they thought I’d enjoy it.

I love getting calls like that.

The contents of that filthy basket were found in the attic of a home being renovated on South 10^th Street. It was crammed with letters, programs, invitations, and wallpaper samples. They provided a glimpse into the life of the Alexander family of Noblesville, brothers Harry and Fred, and their mother, Lou, between 1888 and 1900.

Fred Alexander wrote the earliest letters home from California. In those days young men dreamed of testing themselves in the untamed West, to “grow up with the land,” as they called it. Fred wrote home to the local paper describing his 1888 train trip across the plains and through the mountains. He then often wrote home from Pasadena where he struggled to make something of himself, working in a shoe store.

Throughout that winter I read those letters in the evening after work. I’d spread a towel across my lap and open a few of the filthy, blackened envelopes and carefully read. I’m sentimental enough to get a pang of heartache to think that the careful thoughts and feelings of an entire family, a record of 15 years of their lives could be left strewn in an attic and forgotten, covered with the dry-rot of old wood shingles and filtered debris from a reroofing job.

Time and again I thought, “I’m going to stop with this and give it all to a proper historian like Dave Heighway.” But then, greedily, each night, I’d open a few more letters and read. It was like reading someone’s diary - a guilty pleasure.

Summers in the early 1890s, Fred’s brother Harry wrote to his girlfriend, a young schoolteacher named Clara. During the school year she rented a room in the Alexanders’ 10^th Street house, but spent each summer with her family in Clinton, Indiana. Harry’s letters to Clara give tiny glimpses into life in Noblesville in the 1890s. He describes the flowers planted in the yard, vegetables tended in the garden, the town’s gossip, the newfangled concrete paving of a sidewalk in front of his law office downtown, and the political goings-on in the Methodist Church choir. The letters mention once significant figures in Noblesville – Meade Vestal, leader of the town’s brass band, and Thomas Boyd, then Noblesville’s big man on campus, a state senator who would stand trial in a scandalous paternity suit in 1893.

In these letters Harry Alexander can been seen carefully cultivating a relationship with Clara. Delicate hints of affection – but not too much affection, suggest Harry was uncertain if his interest was returned. In each letter, he calls the Alexanders’ home, “The Rest Cottage.”

In 1892 Fred Alexander returned from California to the little house on 10^th Street, called Anderson Street in those days. He falls in love with a girl from Frankton, named Gertrude. Letters over the next year tell a tragic story.

In spring of1893 Fred finds work in Chicago during the opening of the World’s Fair, writing faithfully to Gertrude, expressing his undying love. He finds an apartment for them and describes the people and the places in Chicago that he dreams will make up their world after they marry. He writes home before the wedding giving instructions to his brother Harry to, “rent a horse and carriage,” and “buy me a new shirt.” In autumn he comes home to ride in that carriage, wear that new shirt, and get married. But Gertrude is sick from a disease the letters never define. After the wedding they stay with her family in Frankton.

Then, in early 1894, Harry, who had gone to Frankton to help Fred through the impending tragedy, writes to Clara, boarding again at the Alexanders’ house in Noblesville, opening his letter with the stark phrase, “Gertrude is gone.” Just months after the wedding, Fred’s wife had died. Amid the jumbled debris in the bushel basket I found a stack of printed flyers, announcing Gertrude’s death. In his misery, Fred returned to California, then wandered to Florida.

But there were many happy things in that bushel basket – hand made invitations to the club parties that filled peoples lives before radio and television, like Shakespeare Club meetings in which members took turns reading the works of the bard. There were colorful, intricately printed invitations to recitals where local children would sing, play piano, or recite famous speeches. There was a program from the dedication of the First Presbyterian Church, a ribbon from “Bromo-Seltzer Day” at the World’s Fair in 1893, a program from a play at famed English’s Opera House in Indianapolis, graduation announcements, and calling cards left at New Year’s Day receptions.

As my winter wore on I followed Harry’s Alexander’s summer letters to Clara. By 1896 his affections were out in the open, and I followed letter by letter their wedding plans and his work to make the “Rest Cottage” just right for her. That summer he traveled regularly by train between Noblesville and Clinton, staying with her family there, missing her terribly when back home.

The last letters come from Fred, fighting in the Spanish-American war, still trying to make something of himself – this time in the military. From a small island near the Philippines, he tells of deprivations, military ineptitude, and personal disappointments.

I don’t know what became of the Alexander family. Don’t know how many children Harry and Clara had, whether Fred ever married again, or when they all said their last goodbye to the “Rest Cottage.” But I think of them every time I pass that little house on 10^th Street.

The Antidote for the Poison of Resentment

"Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die."

- Malachy McCourt

First time I saw that written on a scrap of paper and held to the refrigerator with a magnet, it startled me a little. I immediately thought, “Hell yeah! That rings true.” Anyone of us who ever harbored resentment in our heart toward another person knows full well it hurt us far more than it hurt the target.

But it took mulling McCourt’s quote for a couple weeks before I realized there are two ways to look at it – two lessons to be learned. Embracing one without the other is half a lesson learned.

The first way to see it: Somebody did you wrong, but don’t let your anger & hurt consume or define you.

We’ve all seen magazine articles, facebook posts, and self-help books and blogs with lists that give encouragement to people in times of emotional distress. The lists have titles like, “Rebuilding a New You,” or “Finding Strength in Hard Times.” For short-hand of what you'll find on such lists, sing a few bars of Gloria Gaynor’s 1979 hit, “I Will Survive.”

The general themes follow my initial gut reaction to McCourt’s quote: It’s not your fault. Somebody did you wrong. You’re strong enough to get over it. Rise above.

I read the entire 20+ point list about, “Finding Strength . . .” and it was enlightening, self-affirming, encouraging. But it left me with a nagging shadow of unease. What you never find on those lists, and what you won’t find in Gloria Gaynor’s song is a line that says, “The person that done me wrong might have, in part, done me wrong because I deserved it.” Instead the message is always self-affirming. But sometimes, that’s not all we need.

In my day job I’m a Realtor. I sometimes think of my sales career this way: “I’m always asking the pretty girl to dance, and she says no a lot.”

I do sometimes feel hurt by people who don’t choose me as their Realtor. But as much as possible I try not to go there. Seems like wasted time. Instead I look in the mirror and ask myself what I can do to make sure they say yes next time. I can’t change them. I can only change me. Assuming they’re mistaken and I’m righteous won’t get me the listing or the sale next time.

As often as not, when I do that, I find legitimate reasons why they didn’t choose me. It’s disappointing to face those things, but how else can I get better and thrive in my job?

In J. R. Moehringer’s memoir, The Tender Bar, he wrote, “While I fear that we’re drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we’re defined by what embraces us.”

True, we are all a little like electricity – we follow the path of least resistance. It’s a lot easier, and less painful. Turning away from abandonment and running toward an embrace is comforting. But facing the abandonment, and its cause has to be done sooner or later, or we’re doomed to sing “I Will Survive” again sometime in the future, needing that comforting ointment of justification over and over.

Which led me to the other way to look at McCourt’s quote about resentment: You have work to do to make yourself different. Stop blaming the other person for at least a moment and look at yourself. The poison you drink resenting them rather than facing your part in the conflict will only make your journey of personal awareness harder. Or impossible. Or teach you the wrong lesson.

I’ve come to recognize that sometimes when it feels personal, when it feels like somebody did something intentionally to hurt me, they were simply disagreeing with my fantasy or my image of reality or my expectations about the future. Many of those fantasies, images and expectations were of my own making, and I projected them upon the other person largely by myself. When they didn’t live up to them, I blamed them, not me. Sometimes.

In Notes From Hampstead, Elias Canetti wrote, “Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.”

We don’t want our shared possibilities to be vapor-like echoes, we want them to be solid. When somebody arouses those shared possibilities in vain – beware the impending resentment.

"Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die."

As freeing and transcendent as accepting that statement feels to anyone who has ever harbored resentment and felt it erode their own soul more than it ever hurt the target, I’m thinking there’s another step to take on the way to an even more useful understanding:

Accept that while you’re resenting someone else, they may very well be resenting you. And you both may have very valid reasons. And in doing so, you’ve both been drinking poison, waiting for each other to die, each feeling justified in your personal victimhood.

Yes, in relationships, there are at times true users and abusers, but more times than not I think there are two people who share blame for their mutual failures. But neither can force the other to face their failures, we each can only face our own.

That’s the surest antidote for the poison of resentment I can think of.

Thinking Small is Sometimes Good

Remember “McMansions,” those ever larger homes built with vinyl siding and plastic “woodwork,” set on huge lots. They defined the mad grab for huge square footage in the late ‘90s and early 2000s - lots of space with little quality. But the buyers I’m working with in my day job as a Realtor increasingly want something smaller than they might have chosen 5 years ago, and they want higher quality.

Historic Perspective
In 1950 the average square footage of the typical American home was less than half the size it is today. What’s more, then the average family included over 5 people. It is roughly half that today. So today we average twice as much house for half the people. Those families of 5 or 6 in the 1950s found one bathroom completely reasonable and thought little of having 2 or 3 boys share a single bedroom.

Today I rarely show houses to families that expect their children to share a bedroom. And anything less than 2 baths is considered a hardship.

Though few buyers today are ready to go back to the 1950s, a search for simplicity and a reaction against the housing gluttony of the turn of the 21st century seems to be have taken hold. I also find that recent economic hard times and relentless media stories about folks who overextended themselves has buyers thinking more cautiously, choosing houses safely within their means rather than stretching the wallet to get an extra 500 square feet, a home theater room, or that 3rd garage bay.

Seeking Financial Simplicity
I see a broad trend toward living more simply among my circle of friends and clients. That’s reinforced by what I read in the media. That clutching, grabbing, spending that was so much a part of our lives just a few years ago seems a bit much today. The shallow drive for more and bigger, for quantity over quality, has begun to feel a little like leisure suites from the 1970s or big hair on teen girls in the late ‘80s - makes us roll our eyes and wonder what we were thinking. But it’s not just fashion. Seeing so many people suffering now from the results of being out on a limb when the economy collapsed is sobering, even if you, yourself dodged the worst of the downturn. There is that humming, buzzing suggestion at the back of the mind that you might be the next to lose your job.

I think many of my clients also regret what acquiring all that house did to their lives. There was more to maintain - a huge yard to mow and tend, more gutters to clean, more toilets, sinks, and showers to clean and keep in working order.

A former student from my teaching days called from upstate New York a couple months ago and told me he was being transferred back to Indiana. I spent a day with his family looking at houses spread from Pendleton to Noblesville’s west side. They’re a couple in their early 30s, with two small children and are pre-qualified for homes priced well above $200,000 but were looking only at homes between $150,000 and $200,000, even though their job situation is secure. They’re looking forward to downsizing to live with more financial cushion and have money to do other things.

And during the boom years of ‘05 and ‘06 I found myself working with buyers and sellers on the leading edge of the baby boom generation, looking to downsize as their kids were grown and retirement approached. There’s an old, snarky real estate phrase: “Buyers are liars,” meaning they say they want one thing but buy something else. And my “downsizers” of those boom years did just that. When they saw what downsized square footage actually looked like, they often ended up buying the same square footage they were selling, with their only downsizing concession being to choose a one level ranch with no stairs to climb.

But not anymore. For the most part my retirement-age downsizers truly are downsizing, seeking less to maintain, less to clean, less to worry about, and more money in their pockets so they can visit grandchildren and have fun.

Seeking A More Self-Sufficient Lifestyle
Several other buyers in the past couple years have been looking for homes where they could plant a vegetable garden, can and store their food, run a home business, sew, do woodworking - whatever. There’s a little bit of a retro-hippie, back-to-the-land edge to these buyers. I have a particular soft spot in my heart for such folks because that kinda describes me.

These buyers might forego a newer subdivision for a more urban environment where they can walk to schools, parks, and shopping. They want a farmers market nearby, civic activities at hand, and a more economically and socially diverse community. Though Old Town Noblesville provides most of what’s on that list, I do know families who have left Hamilton County entirely and moved to downtown Indianapolis. Two young families I know in particular have no intention to move back to the suburbs. They have their urban gardens, mass transit busses, and private or charter schools. They love the concentrated excitement of the city.

Quality Over Quantity
Another national trend at play in this housing reassessment is a willingness to pay a little more for locally made and/or higher quality products, while generally consuming less. If you’re bothered by how we Americans buy cheap, foreign crap at Wal-Mart, sell it at garage sales a year later at pennies on the dollar, then go back and buy more cheap, foreign crap at Wal-Mart, then you have some sense of the ethic I’m talking about.

This thinking makes a McMansion with plastic woodwork, filled with furniture made of plywood and wood-grained cardboard less desirable than a house half the size, but with hardwood floors and granite countertops. It’s about downsizing on square footage and upscaling quality and durability.

The common thread running through these various home-buying motivations is about reducing consumption, living more simply and self-sufficiently, and pursuing more long-lived durability. It’s hard to know if this is a profound and lasting shift in cultural values or simply a shock reaction and adaptation to a big, lingering economic downturn. No matter which it is, these shifting home buying values create new opportunities and challenges for my buyers and sellers.

Seeking Social Justice: Social Darwinism vs. Occupy Wall Street, Part 2

The pro-wealth, anti-working class rhetoric I’ve heard in response to the Occupy Wall Street movement is startling, at times sounding like lines from a Dicken’s villain or an 1880s letter to the editor bemoaning hobos. From facebook chats to local coffee shop conversations, from Fox News pundits to “Let it Out” comments in the Indianapolis Star, I’m told the poor are lazy and that the rich are “job creators” whose wealth is inevitable. I hear that any tax increase on the wealthy will kill jobs, and any efforts to limit the power of wealth or the widening gap between rich and poor in this country amount to socialist redistributions of wealth.

You have to want to believe that kind of meanness to hang onto it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, not to mention the opposing moral codes most of us were raised to believe in.

For instance, there has been a redistribution of wealth going on in America, but it’s not going in the direction most people think.

In 1980, at the dawn of the Reagan revolution, the average America CEO earned approximately 42 times as much as the average worker in their company. Today the average CEO earns about 325 times as much as much as his company’s average pay check.

Complain about that staggering pay inequity and the, “You’re a socialist who wants to redistribute wealth,” attack won’t be far behind. It’s a funny claim when you consider that most CEOs don’t own what they manage, they’re hired by their corporation just like the average worker. It’s actually the CEOs and their boards of directors who are redirecting the company’s wealth and hording it. Massive executive pay has become a cultural peculiarity in corporate American, at dramatic odds with pay levels at successful corporations in other industrialized nations.

You won’t hear much talk about this on the political right. Instead they’re busy attacking “overpaid” union workers – you know, the ones making 1/135th what the CEO is earning.

That “excuse the rich/blame the rest” mentality help’s explain growing income disparity in the U.S.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2009 the income gap between rich and poor Americans grew to its greatest level since household income was tracked, nearly double what it was in 1968, giving America the greatest income disparity of any industrialized western nation.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported last year that the disparity between the after-tax income of low and middle class Americans and the wealthiest 1% of the population is the greatest in 80 years. The CBPP attributed this largely to the Bush tax cuts. The wealthiest 10% of Americans got 53% of the total financial benefit of the tax cuts. It’s interesting to note that while Bush and then Republican majorities in the House and Senate were passing these tax cuts in 2001, they were opposing an increase in the minimum wage.

A political mass-email I received recently argued yet again that this income disparity exists because typical Americans are lazy. Hardly.

According to the Center For American Progress, nearly 89% of working American men and 66.5% of women work more than 40 hours a week. And though the Japanese are perceived as very hard workers, the International Labor Organization finds that Americans work 137 hours more a year than the Japanese. The productivity of American workers has increased 400% since 1950. What’s more, American workers take less vacation time than workers in any other western, industrialized nation.

So why do Occupy Wall Street haters continue to argue that people who want more pay equity are lazy bums who want everything handed to them?

In the past year we’ve been inspired by foreign street protesters who built encampments in cities across the world, from Egypt to Libya. But when Occupy protesters used the same tactics to protest for social justice in America, they were labeled lazy troublemakers. I saw a facebook post that pictured a group of American soldiers holding up a sign that reads, “Quit your bitching and get back to work.”

Really? In a nation with an actual (not official) unemployment rate above 10%, you’re gonna call unemployed people lazy? Really?

How about a little “peace on earth, good will toward men?”

And it gets even uglier. Recently on facebook I saw a post showing an image of a group of Occupy protesters set beside an image of flag draped coffins. A caption read, “Some want all. Some gave all. See the difference?” This is the cruelest cheap shot I’ve seen in politics in a long time. It didn’t just claim that people fighting for social justice want handouts for doing nothing, it suggested that fighting for it was some sort of insult to our fallen soldiers. And yet, approving comments accumulated for that hateful message.

I sat in the IRT last Sunday night with my family watching a marvelous stage version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” As Scrooge went on his rants about the lazy poor who have too many children (lines written in 1843), as we watched the struggles of the hard-working, but poverty-stricken Cratchit family, who needed but couldn’t get health care for Tiny Tim, I got to wondering who’s side Occupy Wall Street haters would be on. What Scrooge was mouthing was only a slightly meaner version of what I hear regularly in political discourse about wealth and poverty in present-day America.

The Occupy Wall Street movement isn’t about socialism. It’s about social justice. Which is ironic, because I so often hear conservatives talk about the “good ol’ days.” But America of 40, 50 or 60 years ago was a time when the wealthy made less and paid far higher taxes, and when common workers made more and union membership was far more common. I guess some people are a little forgetful about what the good ol’ days were really like.

The data make it pretty clear, on economic terms, the good ol’ days America is now evolving toward isn’t like the ‘40s, ‘50s, or ‘60s, but more like Victorian-era America, when the poor made up the largest share of the population, the middle class was relatively small, and the wealthy controlled a staggering percentage of the national wealth and used it to utterly control the political system.

Social justice is something most of us believe in. And we didn’t learn it from an ACLU pamphlet or a socialist manifesto. We learned it on Sunday mornings in church as children.

What record we have of the life of Jesus reveals a man who spent most of his days preaching in favor of social justice – love your neighbor, help those who have less than you. So why is it such a threatening message when it’s voiced in the political arena?

Worshiping Wealth: Social Darwinism vs. Occupy Wall Street, Part 1

When conservative pundits quickly labeled Occupy Wall Street protesters as lazy, class-warfare, socialists, few seemed to realize they were revealing their own class-conscious bias, casting their own stones in America’s escalating season of class warfare.

Perhaps the quickest way to draw the ire of modern-day conservatives is to question the legitimacy of unlimited wealth. It’s a reminder that blind faith in the purity of wealth has far deeper roots in America than does socialist leanings.

In Victorian-era America, beliefs eventually labeled Social Darwinism were commonly accepted notions. Promoted by English philosopher Herbert Spencer and sociologist William Graham Sumner, it applied Darwin-like theories about the biological evolution of man to economic success.

In the thinking of Spencer and Sumner, Bill Gates is at the top of the food chain – he’s a superior human being, and you . . . well, if you’re a working stiff, your knuckles might as well drag the ground. To Social Darwinists of the 1880s & ‘90s, this was not only true, but also a good thing. The rich would pave the way for mankind.

You hear this echoed today in the rhetoric on the right who label the rich as, “job creators.” Kinda funny when you consider how many top earners have gotten massive year-end bonuses for cutting jobs at their companies, not creating them.

It’s surprising how many middle and low-wage earners subscribe to the lavish, “job creators,” linguistic spin, too, but it’s nothing new. This worship of the wealthy also wormed its way into the hearts of envious and hopeful 19^th Century Americans who eked out lives of drudgery.

Funny, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Nearly 150 years ago, Spencer and Sumner urged trickle-down economic policies with few regulations on commerce and wealth. Let the rich get richer and it will eventually help the poor. And they opposed aid to the poor. Why intervene against the laws of nature? The rich were rich and the poor were poor as a result of natural selection.

Before that century’s end, Social Darwinism took on an ironic twist that no socialist critic could have concocted. It became justified on a religious basis by the very forces who railed against Darwin’s original theories. Not only were the rich a product of natural selection, but also that selection was sanctioned by God. Poverty was punishment for sin.

In his famous speech titled “Acres of Diamonds,” given thousands of times in big cities and small dusty towns across the country in the1880s and 1890s, the Reverend Russell Conwell argued to adoring audiences, “ . . . the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, . . .”

In this era Mark Twain dubbed “The Gilded Age,” industrialists smugly clutched this concept to their chests as justification for the profits they ground out of the lives of poor immigrants. And many immigrants themselves accepted that thinking. Ashamed of their circumstances they hoped, “maybe I’m pure enough to become wealthy, too.”

There’s nothing wrong with upward mobility – it’s everyone’s dream and the rational path to a more comfortable life, but to think it would put you straight with God converts the American Dream into an 11^th Commandment: “Thou shalt earn a fortune.”

This Victorian faith in wealth-without-limits played out in an era of corporate monopolies and trusts that at times virtually enslaved workers and cheated small business people as a matter of intended function. These abuses of power were so egregious they led to anti-trust and child labor legislation, and eventually the rise of labor unions. But the Social Darwinists of the era decried such developments as unnecessary intrusion into free enterprise.

Interestingly, this justification of boundless wealth for a chosen few at the expense of the majority, though defended as free enterprise, ended up having far more to do with notions of monarchy. The monopolies and trusts, best exemplified by the railroads, Standard Oil, and U.S. Steel resulted in a kind of semi-free-enterprise feudalism, with corporate leaders living like economic lords, dukes and kings, ruling from positions of staggering wealth, perverting the political system and national commerce for their private benefit.

Most modern Americans cringe at these theories and the brutal economy it created, but sympathy survives. Look up Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” on Amazon.com and see it heralded in reader reviews as a long forgotten, inspirational text.

On the surface, Social Darwinism has been relegated to the past with other harsh beliefs our ancestors once held dear, but in the same way a great grandmother’s eyes or smile are passed down through generations and inherited by a great grand child, we see glimpses of Social Darwinism today in our attitudes about the rich and poor.

Unquestioning faith in wealth is alive and well in America and influences our current political debates about taxes, balancing budgets, regulating Wall Street, the assault on teacher, police, and firefighter labor unions, and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In the late 1800s Social Darwinism was a jagged stone in the soul of America. That stone has tumbled down the riverbed of a century, its rough edges rounded, it’s nasty pallor polished smooth. But it’s still the same stone.

Next post I’ll take a more modern look at these pro-wealth impulses.

Update on Positron Post:

During an October post criticizing Noblesville Mayor John Ditslear's plan to offer the Fisher's-based corporation, Positron millions of dollars in hand-outs to relocate in Noblesville, I detailed Positron's long history of legal troubles. In late November the Federal Securities and Exchange Commission accused Positron's CEO of defrauding investors. To read details printed in the IBJ, follow this link: http://www.ibj.com/sec-accuses-positron-ceo-of-misleading-investors/PARAMS/article/31020

The Trouble With Nirvana

The road to contentment, to nirvana is a perilous road, fraught with dangers in the ditch on either side. Contentment lies between the white lines, for in the ditch on one side lies addictions, gluttony, and the hollow life of one who floats from one compelling experience to the next in search of a better thing. The other side of the road is not so much a ditch as it is a rut, the place you get stuck when you play it safe and settle for less.

How to keep it between the white lines is the trick. And I’m not talking about happiness. Happiness is way too easy to find. But contentment? Now that’s the hard thing.

Going through old computer files last week I found a letter I wrote in July of 1999 to my sister, Cindy. It was written at Duck Lake in Michigan. I described for Cindy what everyone was doing on that hot summer day and said a thing or two about each person’s personality

Describing my then, 8 year old son, Jack, I wrote to my Cindy:
“Jack works about earnestly to keep up with his big brother. He wants to succeed, to do as well as older kids. But because he’s younger and smaller, of course he can’t, and nobody could ever be as hard on him as he is on himself. Like so many other middle children he’s forever convinced that he’s cheated in things, that others get more of everything. No amount of love or success could ever convince him otherwise. I remember once when you and I were younger, you confided in me with dismay that there is never enough love and kisses to convince you that you are truly loved. I fear Jack will feel that way about the world.”

Finding and rereading that letter was such a pleasant surprise, I shared a copy with each of my children.

Jack, now 6’ tall, 20 years old, and away at college, sent a touching, emotional reply, part of which read:
“I love that description you wrote of me. I still am almost that exact same way. No amount of success or love will ever be good enough. That quality may be my greatest downfall.”

I responded to Jack with one sentence: “People chase gold, money, love, and sex, but contentment is the most rare, precious, and fleeting thing known to man.”

The experts think of Nirvana in varied ways. Some as freedom from suffering, some as transcendence above earthly needs. The word literally means, “blowing out,” as in blowing out the fires of greed, hatred and delusion.” I think of it as contentment, the accepting of what is rather than constantly clamoring for what might be.

It’s amazing how illusive contentment can be and how much of it is guided by our expectations.

It’s a delicate balance. And having everything you want isn’t the answer. Most people dream of fame and fortune, but a study of Hollywood actors and professional athletes reveals a group of people with staggering rates of divorce, substance abuse, and a shorter life span than the average American. Clearly, having everything you want won’t buy contentment, in fact probably makes it harder to see, harder to achieve.

Many philosophers have said it before, but I suspect that contentment, like so many other important qualities in life is not a destination, but a journey – not a place you arrive at, but a thing you juggle.

Recently, an old friend with a lovely home, happy children, and a successful career, but no spouse, shared her deep sadness with me. With her youngest off at college, she confided, “I’m tired of doing this alone.” Yet, I’m sure many in her little town think she’s got it all figured out.

Another friend I truly admire has shared tales of the lost years he spent looking for contentment at the bottom of the bottle. He did drugs with rock stars in San Francisco in the 1960s, owned successful restaurants at a mountain resort, and was married, but eventually destroyed everything he’d built thanks to alcoholism. Today, he runs a small business and makes a modest income, attends church, works out daily, travels as often as he can, and lives a carefully managed, alcohol-free life.

Contentment looks different when you have the extreme opposite to compare it to.

I have known a few people who projected contentment – even claimed to have achieved it, but most really had just perfected the ascetic – that ability to deny themselves pleasure for long stretches, so to enjoy it at precise moments of opportunity. Most of these had not found contentment, but simply had learned to wrestle their desires to a truce. These are the most frozen people I’ve ever known, though they look on the outside anything but frozen. They fear the commitment of choosing and being trapped by the choice and so enjoy pleasures as little vacations. Which is fine with a real vacation. But when deep friendships and intimate relationships are treated like vacations – things isolated from your daily life, enjoyed briefly before returning to your ascetic routine, you end up making a very disciplined, but very lonely, hollow person, because the contentment that comes from the permanence of commitment cannot be substituted by a mountain of temporary experiences. And for these sorts of folk, I fear their ascetic discipline hardwires their fault. Might be easier to change an alcoholic or drug addict.

Oh what a slippery thing contentment . . . nirvana can be.

And of course I’m left thinking of the rock band, Nirvana. Their song "Lithium" is 4 minutes and 17 seconds of churning, surging, screaming, musical nirvana. It’s a song for which there is no volume high enough to satisfy me. With a chugging base line behind him, Kurt Cobain sings the opening lines, “I’m so happy, ‘cause today I found my friends, they’re in my head.”

Perhaps that’s where contentment is for everyone; it’s in our heads.

Cobain was tortured by mental illness, so the reference to Lithium, a drug used to prevent frenzied excitement in manic-depressives is no surprise. Nirvana (the state of mind, not his band) was so out of reach for him that a shotgun in the mouth seemed like a reasonable option. And at least it finally settled once and for all his search for peace and contentment.

So as the years pass, I am more convinced than ever that contentment doesn’t come from having everything you want or from having complete control, but from a mixture of deprivation and comfort, and freedom and commitment, all in their proper measure.

But I haven’t a clue what the proper measure is.