The Race

Last month, I was so overwhelmed with my workload that I went and bought a todo list program for my phone just to get it all out of my head. Last week, that program had 32 todo items on it, and all but five were already overdue.

Seeing the error of my ways, I decided that it was time to stop procrastinating and just do. So I googled “How to stop procrastinating.” Then, as if trying to learn how to stop procrastinating wasn’t enough, I saw an entire book with a three step program on how to stop procrastinating. The program didn’t look that interesting to me, so I clicked several other links, looking for all out help on how to stop, and just do what I needed to do. I had spent long enough pushing off everything that really needed to be done. When those links didn’t pay off and my todo list had reached it’s all time high of 37 items, I finally sat down at my computer and googled, “how to just do”. Link number one was “Couples just do it: Couple has sex for 101 straight days”- apparently a couple that has been married for 14 years decided to have an experiment and then talked about it on the Today show- and link number two was “Nike’s Just Do It advertising campaign”- an ad campaign completely based on the idea of “stop procrastinating, stop making excuses. just exercise.” Brilliant. Now to only tap into the idea of Nike’s ad campaign and learn how to implement it into my own every day life.

And so, in an effort to stop procrastinating, I googled “the history of Nike’s just do it”. And then came in Wikipedia. I learned that the boys in Portland, Oregon, after years of the “Just Do It” campaign, got over 200 complaints for a 2000 Olympics ad that featured Olympic runner Suzy Favor-Hamilton drawing a bath, then being chased out of cabin in the woods by a would-be killer. Suzy outruns the killer and leaves him breathless, while the captions come up telling you you’ll live longer if you run. Good point. This got me thinking about my current fitness plan, which has me running thirty minutes 3x a week, and the NYC marathon. Maybe I should train for next year’s marathon, I think… And so, google comes in handy once again as I search “from couch to marathon”.

Runwizard.com. An excellent article about going from not running at all to running a marathon in just 9 months. And if I’m already running, then if he can do it, I can do it. I’m already doing a 5k, so this will be easy. Immediately, I plot out my running program for the next several months, but then I wonder, what about weekends? So I go back to read the article. And yet, he has no training program written. Just an article of how he did it. Really? An article of “I did it”, and not telling us how? So back to my search…

Running a marathon was never on my written todo list. It never made it onto my todo list that I had written up and posted to the refrigerator at home. It never made it onto any grocery list, nothing that had to be done today. And that number “32″ was glaring at me from my phone, telling me that I had done absolutely nothing so far today. And the day was already half way over. So I finally went back to the todo list, and then, after reading it and thinking, “this is too much”, I began updating the todo list. And then the bright idea to break things up into small pieces to make it more manageable. And then the number changed- 32 was now 43. Great.

The truth is, I haven’t learned. I haven’t learned how to just do it, how to stop procrastinating, how to stop being overwhelmed. All I’ve learned is time passes, whether you want it to or not. At the end of the day, I’m left with knowledge of how to run a marathon, but no motivation to actually run it. I’ve got more to do on my list than I started the day with, and I’ve now got one less day to do it. And the feeling in my soul is a crushing blow of defeat for the day.

All the experts have their own way of dealing with procrastination, and a quick search on it will tell you millions of them. Scott Young says to reward yourself after completing a task. Webmd recommends breaking it up into smaller tasks.  Ehow.com recommends enlisting friends to help. And Oprah’s Martha Beck says that “knowing why you’re procrastinating helps you overcome it”. All good pieces of advice, but I have to wonder, isn’t getting advice on how to step procrastinating just another form of it?

My acting coach in college told me one day that I had a fear of success. I was 19 and told myself that she was nuts. A loony Alexander coach that had no grip on the real world. Afraid of success, I thought? How does that make any sense whatsoever? Ten years later, however, I have come to the conclusion that her statement about my Alexander technique has been completely true in my day to day life. My lifelong goals are always looming in the distance, but I struggle to actually start pursing them. And the only answer I can come up with to why is simply this question: “What if?” What if it doesn’t work out? What if I miss out on something else? What if it does work out, and everything changes? What if? Fear of the unknown is a good reason that a person doesn’t make a move and instead just sits in deliberation. Think, for instance, of the fear of death. Isn’t that the greatest unknown? And it is the one fear that will always loom, and the one we will always have to deal with.

Just do it. Nike will never have to think of another tagline. Three words have captivated everything that they stand for, that people strive for, and that can push you through to the next level. The next adventure. Putting on your running shoes and starting that first half mile stretch down the road can someday lead you to 26.2 miles over bridges and cities. That first marathon can lead you to the Olympics, and those games can lead you to being a celebrity. Starting that relationship can lead you to marriage, which leads to kids, which leads to all sorts of new experiences. And writing that article can lead to novels, tv shows, and the mastering of the written word. And death? Well, in the words of Peter Pan, “To die would be a great adventure.” To just do it is to begin anew. To start a new journey, and in all it’s unknowns, in all its “what ifs”, what we do know is that at the end, we’re always glad we did it. And then we never have to face the ultimate fear: regret. That underlying pitifult feeling that something stopped us from achieving what we had to do. As FDR called it, “the fear itself.”

It’s easy to procrastinate. You can do it without even thinking about it. But what if Superman said “I’ll save Lois later”? What if the Egyptians never invented beer? What if? Maybe the answer to that question isn’t always a bad thing. Maybe that answer is the exact reason to get started. After all, what if we’re successful, and what if we like it?

So stop reading. Stop procrastinating. And- well, you know.

I went to the opera last week.

I have no idea what happened, but this blonde woman sang to this short, pudgy, Hispanic guy. She held onto him, and sang something to the effect of “Blah latavia latitzia de of blah blah blah”, but for just a moment of trying to figure out why she was supposed to love this guy, who had no chemistry with her whatsoever, I heard the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. One note. One note rang through the speakers and through the air above all else and ripped my soul apart. Just as I had stood up for a coffee break and to listen to some silence, I was stopped dead in my tracks by this one note that I had heard over and over before. That night, that note was the meaning of life.

Yesterday, after passing by 800 spots of dried gum on the sidewalks, 4 people asking for handouts, 3 democratic street workers asking me if I had time for the Democratic Party, and about twenty full cabs just when I was needing one, I hurried past the grocery store, and the sound of a really good jazz trio played for tips just outside the door. The trio consisted of one horn player, wearing old tattered clothes, one keyboard player, who looked like he was doing completely fine in life, and one seemingly homeless man playing the drums on several upside down buckets, and  But the sound was worthy of a $35 ticket and a two-drink minimum.

It’s dark. Cold. Raining today. The summer of wine and roses has given away to the land of jackets, umbrellas, and gray days. But inside the cafe, the smell of freshly ground beans is flowing through the air system, so the room is filled with a rich but subtlety sweet aroma, thick enough warm your heart, but light enough to let you just sit and enjoy.

We are a culture of “finding perfection.” I’m completely guilty of it. Whether it’s a recipe, a restaurant, a bar, a performance, a tv show. I go to the Metropolitan Opera and criticize the three hundred year old story about a man selling his prized coat to save a dying woman, instead of listening to the beauty Puccini composed, and completely ignoring that I’m sitting inside one of the most famed buildings in the world. I am the most critical of critics I know, and when people ask me why, I’m honest. I’m a perfectionist. I want it to sound good, and have a good message. I want the music to be beautiful, and for the dialogue to cut to the point and stop Stephen King’ing it’s way through. What I find though, is that being a perfectionist works rather well, until you come up against a perfection that’s not your own.

True, we’re all perfectionists of some sort. But that doesn’t mean that we’re all the same perfectionists. Wikipedia defines perfectionism as the believe that perfection can be attained. Easy enough, until you start to define perfection. To me, perfection might be Bermuda, but speak to the homeless man holding your door open and his hand out, and he might say that perfection is a trash bag without holes, or a sandwich. To me, perfection might be the perfect sound. But to someone else, perfection of the same sentence might be the perfect message. The ultimate defeat comes when you realize that the same object of perfection can’t and won’t live up to everyone’s expectations. (Just to hammer in the point, Wikipedia also goes on to link perfectionism with narcissism and OCD.)

Everyday, every minute, every second, someone learns that nothing is perfect. And the world is full of things to criticize. And it becomes a pretty depressing place. Lonely. And pitiful. But when you take out the quest for perfection, the world turns into a place of experiences. And just maybe, just maybe, as you begin to live through them and love them for what they are, then every once in a while throughout all the mess, you’ll find something meaningful. Something amazing. Something exquisite.

Something beautiful.

There’s a good chance I’m going to die of a heart attack.

I don’t mean this as a threat, as just because of the happenings with my dad in the last couple of days. But because I have a history of being “The Great… Everything.” As the cliché goes, “jack of all trades, master of none.” I resent that. But still, just today I have redesigned a website, written a short story, checked up on my family, tried to be a good pet owner, a good housekeeper, a good writer, and a successful job hunter. And still, my feeling is that I haven’t done enough. Just yesterday, I spent an entire day working online, writing, and checking up on my family in the middle of a crisis, and even went to the gym, and yet, I’d say that I could have done more. No matter if I was up at 7 and went to bed at 1:30 in the morning, I absolutely, positively could have done more. And there’s a chance that I could do the same today. And tomorrow.

Why?

New York City is a culture based on being succesful. Elizabeth Gilbert, in her book, “Eat, Pray, Love,” speaks of each city’s “word”- a one word description of the major cities of the world. Rome=”sex”, the Vatican=”power”, and New York: “Achieve”. While Gilbert gives NYC its word, it’s almost impossible to say that she has it wrong. Since the 1970s, the city seems to have been built off of Frank Sinatra’s remnants, “If I can make it there/ I can make it anywhere.” Broadway is “the best” of the world’s theater (and even that’s not enough; now there’s the “Best of Broadway”), Wall Street is the place for “serious finance”, which is great, until, as we’ve seen recently, there’s a serious crash.

The tourists that come here ask us constantly, “How do you do it all? How do you see it all?”, and there’s one simple answer. You can’t. There’s ten million people in the Five Boroughs. That’s ten million waiters, brokers, writers, filmmakers, actors, mothers, fathers, every type of “ers”, all trying to live up to Sinatra’s mantra. All trying to succeed, the majority of them trying to do “it all”. But the majority of them are only here for a short time. I may be getting off track here a little, but many New Yorkers, myself included, in “striving to make it here”, burn out. They try to make the most of the city, but in doing so, they leave out some of the best parts. In trying to succeed, they lose track of what they came here for in the first place, and forget to relax. They leave New York, promising that “next time around”, they’ll “do it better.” As if they didn’t live up to the city’s standards. And even less, their own.

This is not supposed to be about New York, but it is about our culture. Depression affects nearly 19 million Americans, and any therapist will tell you, a very important step in treating depression is trying to get the patient to realize that right now, they are at this place, and at this time, and they have to deal with this situation. In other words, deal with one thing at a time. If the focal point of treating depression (while I’m fully aware that there are hundreds of other treatments) is to do one thing at a time, what makes dealing with our own lives any different?

Imagine you’re going to the grocery store. You walk in, and there are no aisles. There’s no organization. The breads are next to the cereals, the milk is next to the bread, the dog food is next to the lettuce. I don’t know about you, but I’d stop dead from being overwhelmed. But you put in aisles, and you can spend hours going up and down, looking at all the fantastic new products and food that can get you one step closer to your dreams, or at least, a full stomach. Those who went to a liberal arts school (myself included) also realize now that while it took you years to find the right career path, those who focused on a single field are already working, and probably doing fairly well for themselves. (Doh!)

I can’t think further ahead than one day at a time, and yet I find myself having panic attacks over and over again because of the vast thought that by the end of my lifetime, I have certain things I have to get done. While it’s great to have a plan, one shouldn’t find themselves curled up on the floor because they can’t get it all done today. It’s important to remember while we’re trying to “achieve” that achievement itself comes in small doses. You get the chance to compete before you get the medal. And before we find ourselves completely burnt out, we have to remember to take just a moment to think about what’s going on now, what we have to get done, and how it effects our overall desires. And once we’ve done this, we’ll find that our minds have a single accomplishable goal to focus on. In achieving this small win today, later we get to relax, because we know that we’ve done one small thing to take us to our goal tomorrow.

Time passes. Life goes on around us. And when you just sit and be, you don’t notice it. Things move, without any sense of a plan or meaning. But when you really look at it, even time, the most general fact in our universe, has a focus. Every decade, every year, every day, every hour, every minute, every second, there is a focus. But even time knows that in order to acheive, it must deal with one moment, well, at a time. After all, it can’t do everything.

At the time of writing this, my dad is in the middle of open heart surgery, and while I have all intentions of him being just fine and will talk to him tonight, still, it makes me think about our my own mortality.

Our culture is one that relies heavily on people making their way to the top. We all want to be famous. We all want to be rich, whether we admit it or not. Even if we don’t necessarily want the celebrity-ism attached with a certain amount of wealth, you can’t argue that to be completely debt-free and retired early is extremely desirable. But what does it take to get there?

Chances are if you’re in my society, my generation, you’re working to make it to the top of your field. Because what part of “following your dreams” means “I want to be middle management”? I always tell my wife, when I die, I want to be remembered. My actual quote was, “I don’t want to save the world, I just want to change it.” Still a good thought in my mind. A good goal. And frankly, realistically, in a world of 6 billion people, I’ve got a very slim chance at making a meaningful change to the world as a whole. But that doesn’t mean that I should actually give it up.

The thought of my dad on a surgical table makes me think, what will he be remembered for, when his time does come? Here is a man who worked his entire life as a Funeral Director. Day in, day out. He’s never moved out of his hometown. He’s never met with world leaders to discuss the changing economy, AIDS, or nuclear weapons. He grew up Southern, Republican, and a Baptist. Some might say typical, but when you find yourself saying that, think about this. The man has worked his entire life. He’s been married to the same woman for 20 years, he’s raised two children of his own, and two step-children. He spent years taking care of his dying mother, making sure she had only the best care, and made sure that all of us growing up in his household had a college education and the skills to make it as an adult. And outside of his own life, he’s spent the last forty years taking care of his community as a volunteer, a board member, and the person people come to at the saddest and hardest parts of their lives- their loved one’s deaths.

Right now, he’s in the same place where millions of people in the world come to at some time- his life in someone else’s hands. And no matter whether he’s Trump, Nietzsche, or Obama, he’d be in the same place, and in the same situation. While there’s a good chance my dad will probably never be written up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, there is a absolute certainty that those that know him will say that he has helped change their lives for the better. And while his world is obviously a smaller world than mine, he has in fact done what I set out to do. He has changed it. And whether his last day on Earth is today (which, it’s not), or forty years from now, he, and many others like him, has shown that life is not about the finish.

It’s about the race.