Lockdown Month in Review

My last day in the office, before we began the social distancing lockdown to fight the novel coronavirus, was March 13.  So today marks the beginning of the second month confined largely to home with my family of six.  What has it been like?

1.  Pre-lockdown life was way too busy.  In addition to the "jet lag" problem that I wrote about earlier, our family online calendar used to look like a colorful contemporary art piece, with multiple events for multiple people every day.  All of that got eliminated overnight.  Some of it we miss (kids soccer games, monthly dinner out with our supper club); a lot of it we don't.  In fact, I think a lot of our activities we were involved in just to keep us from being bored at home.  Now we know we aren't bored at home, so hopefully we will be more selective once the lockdown ends.

2.  There is freedom in the structure of routine.  We value our routine that we have fallen into:  set meal times (approximately set:  we aren't running a monastery or naval ship), daily exercise breaks, plenty of time for school and work, nightly entertainment.  Having a routine eliminates decisions (what time should we eat?) which reduces stress.  Within the routine, though, there is lots of freedom for when school and work gets done.

3.  We like our family meal times.  my wife and I have been eating lunch outside in the sunshine every day.  Now that no one has activities in the evenings, all six of us linger longer at the dinner table.  (Longer is relative:  15 minutes instead of kids dashing off as soon as their food is chewed and swallowed.)  For some reason, there has been much less strife among the kids since the lockdown began, even though the college student really wishes he weren't here.

So now we are starting to think about life after lockdown, assuming it begins to lift in a month or so.  What should we add back to our schedules?  How can we maintain some of the good vibes we have now?

Jet Lag

One very minor upside to the social distancing quarantines we've been under for two weeks now:  I can find time to start writing again.

Week three of social isolation is underway, a long enough time that I can start to draw some conclusions about my "old" life.  I already wonder if I will ever go back to a daily driving commute--this walk up the stairs after breakfast is a lot less stressful than a typical Atlanta rush hour, and my productivity certainly hasn't dropped and might even be higher.  Most of my work days are spent on the phone and computer anyway, and my department is spread across the country, so it should have been predictable that remote working isn't that much different from office working for me.  (I'm lucky that my kids are old enough to be self sufficient at their home schooling, and that I have a wife who doesn't work outside the home and keeps the household running flawlessly.)

On the unpredictable side, I have been most surprised to find that I'm sleeping each night much better than I was before the lockdown.  Not more, necessarily, but better, deeper, more restorative sleep.  I have changed nothing else in my diet or routine to deliberately chase sleep; I would have though I was sleeping soundly before.  But the difference is enough to be noticeable, and I've been reflecting on why this could be.  The best idea I've had is that it corresponds to the sudden shutdown of my usual peripatetic travel schedule.  Is it possible I had been living in a steady state of jet lag?

I was not regularly jet-lagged in the traditional sense of my body clock being off by a few time zones.  Most of my business travel takes place in my home EST time zone or the neighboring CST that is one hour behind.  But what my travel lacked in distance was perhaps made up for in frequency:  according to Delta, I flew 83 flight segments in 2019, which is over 40 round trips.  Thanks to the fact that my home airport, ATL, is the busiest in the world with direct flights to dozens of cities, I am fortunate to frequently be able to make day trips for meetings.  Sometimes I might have two days like that in a week; occasionally they will be back-to-back so that I get home late one evening then get up early the next morning and head straight back to the airport.  Sometimes the return flights are late, so that I get to bed an hour or two later than normal.  In between trips, there are regular work days and kids activities and social outings, etc.  Many of us know what this business (or "busy-ness") looks like--and many have it worse than I do.

For three weeks now, all of this has come to a sudden and complete halt.  No rushing around, no extra  activities, no flights.  Instead, our family has settled into a fairly steady routine, with fairly regular meal times, a little outdoor exercise each day, and to bed at about the same time every night.  Some of what we've lost in outside socializing we are making up with family time together, playing games and watching movies.  And presto, I'm sleeping more deeply than I have in years.

My conclusion:  I was jet lagged--not so much by actual jet travel, but by the incessant activity that seems to be the steady state operating model for most American professionals and their families.  I wasn't always crossing time zones, but I was compressing and shifting my perception of time through constant motion of mind and body.  Now, without all that rushing around, my mind has finally caught up with my body, I'm sleeping better, and I feel great.

So here's what I'm contemplating as I sit at home:  in two weeks or two months or whenever the social distancing protocols begin to relax and "normal" life begins to restart, how far back to the old ways will I allow myself to get?  I can't, and don't want to, stay sequestered at home forever--monasticism is not for me, and I'm too young to retire.  But is there a point somewhere between sheltering in place and the restless rush of relentless motion that would find me contributing fully to my job, home, and community, while still allowing me to sleep very well at night?  I wonder.

Weight Loss

Just in time for resolution season, Zac Brown Band has released a new song, "Homegrown", that has inspired me to go on a weight loss plan.  Not a diet, mind you; I’m talking about reducing what the Band calls “the weight that you carry of the things you think you want."

Want to feel lighter this year?  Don’t count calories; count your blessings.  I’m going to reduce my wish list, not my weight.  In the song, Zac names some of his blessings:  his “good friends, living down the street,” his attractive wife, his pleasant small town (where, presumably, everyone knows his name), and realizes: “I’ve got everything I need, and nothing that I don’t.”

It would be tempting to dismiss Zac Brown’s contentment:  of course he is content!  Zac is a country music mega-star who could surely afford anything he wants or needs.  I can hear someone asking, "What if he was burdened with my underwater mortgage, dead-end job, tapped-out credit card, and surly spouse?”  Surely then he’d be writing about being “home flown”, not “Homegrown".

Perhaps.  But I appreciate the reminder that threads through many of Zac’s songs—“Homegrown" is only the latest example—to appreciate the simple good things in life, many of which are free or cheap and available to us all, regardless of our employment status or bank account balance.  Consider:

I like my chicken fried, cold beer on a Friday night, a pair of jeans that fit just right…there is no dollar sign on peace of mind....  

That’s from the band’s breakout hit single, “Chicken Fried,” in 2008.  Now nearly seven years later, Zac and band are still extolling the virtues of home, family, and simple living.  “Homegrown” reminds us of this again, and adds to it the realization that much of our angst, emotional baggage, and simple unhappiness comes from wanting what we don’t have rather than what we do have.  “It’s the weight that you carry of the things you think you want” that slows us down.

So while I am not normally a new year’s resolution person, this year I’m taking Zac Brown’s advice to pay more attention to the good things I’ve already got.  And I’m going to focus on reducing the length of my wish list—too much wanting will only weigh me down.

Chasing Two Hares

Our quote of the day comes to us via Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project, and falls under the category of ancient wisdom for modern times:

"He who chases two hares will catch neither."
 -Publius Syrus

I've written before about the false promise of multitasking, the seductive idea that we can do more in less time by doing two (or more!) things at once.  The truth, unfortunately, is that our brains aren't wired that way.  Modern brain research continues to discover that human attention cannot be divided and still perform at the highest level.  We are fooling ourselves if we think we are boosting our output by multitasking.

Publius Syrus figured out in the first century BC what our modern scientists are explaining in detail today:  if you want to catch two hares, you have to start by catching one hare.  Chasing two at a time will not get you to your goal faster.

Have a long to-do list?  Pick the most important item that you can do right now, and do it.  Then move on to the next one.  Don't be tempted to do more than one thing at a time--you'll get more done, and what you do will be done better, and you'll be happier for it.

More to Life than Work

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Emily Esfahani Smith tells about how her mom's advice to collect a boyfriend as well as a degree while at college proved to be the right advice.  While the assertion that meeting a partner while in college is easier than in the post-college yearsbis interesting to discuss, I thought Ms. Smith's more important point came somewhat later in the essay:

There is far more to happiness than career success.

Ms. Smith is blessed to have learned at a young age what many of us discover more slowly over a much longer time, often after it is too late to save a marriage, or participate in a child's milestones:  there is more to life than work.  A successful career can certainly be one important component of a happy life, but it is never the only component, and often not the most important one.

For women especially, Ms. Smith points out, a lifetime of being told you can achieve anything often translates into pressure that you should achieve "everything", whatever that means.  But in truth, says Ms. Smith:

Career success and relationships are both undoubtedly important to women's happiness, but many young and ambitious women value their personal lives more than their career aspirations. And that feeling intensifies over time.

I'm hardly qualified to explore the various feminist arguments for or against her point, but I'm glad she made it because I think it offers a worthy reminder for all of us, men and women, to not get stuck with a one-track life that never leaves the career track.  By all means be proud of your professional accomplishments, but never forget that a "personal life" is much more than just achievement--it is the people you choose to spend time with, and the relationships you develop with those people.

Restart

After several months of working on other projects, I have recently turned my thoughts back to Present Tense Living and the need for proper perspective about the time of our life.  Prompted partly by the hectic nature of my own family’s life—four school-aged children and all their activities can certainly fill up a schedule—and partly by lots of media attention on the issue of “balance” following the recent publication of books like Lean In, I have been reminded that a regular dose of perspective about how we use the time we have is still important.

I begin by reminding myself:  what exactly is present tense living?  At its most basic, “living in the present tense” means being thankful for the day you have in front of you—today—and making the most of it.  Do the task you have to do today with purpose; love the people you encounter today with abundance; appreciate the experiences you have today with gratitude.  Too often, much of our daily existence is taken up with lamenting the past or worrying about the future.  It is good to learn from the past, and to prepare for the future, but when those activities dominate our thinking, we can miss out on the pleasures of today.  This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!

So as I look around my upper-middle-class American environment, do I see people living in the present tense?  Are we enjoying the people, places, and things that already surround us, or are we focused on the chase after more and different people, places, and things that might make us happy in the future?

Some of what I see is good.  Certainly many of us realize how fortunate we are to have come through the Great Recession with our jobs intact—especially in my field of banking.  The job we have may not be the perfect one, but compared to no job it is pretty good.  Some of the conspicuous consumption that drove so much spending before the recession has cooled off—we now realize that everything doesn’t have to be brand name all the time.

But the busyness of life, the speed at which we seem to be passing through our days, continues unabated and is probably still accelerating.  We continue striving to do more in less time; the mistake of multi-tasking is till rampant; the pressure to be “always-on” continues unabated; the temptation to upgrade and update is stronger than ever.  For example, I have a wired phone in my basement at home that is around 10 years old and works great, exactly like it always has.  By comparison, a 2-year-old cell phone (if you’re willing to be seen with one) seems quaintly outdated, and a 5-yr-old one probably doesn’t even work on a modern network.  We are encouraged to upgrade nearly every year, whether we need it or not.

None of the stuff we are pursuing is bad in itself.  The problem comes when we are running after it only because everyone else is, so that after awhile we can't remember why we started running, or how we ended up in this race.  Present Tense Living encourages us to pause to appreciate what we already have; maybe we don’t need to run quite so fast anymore to catch something we aren’t sure we want anyway.  Be deliberate about what you do; you want to follow the path you set, not the one your culture sets for you.  Money and stuff are nice, but they aren’t the point.  Relationships, experiences, memories—REM—will give you a much richer life.

As the recent excitement over books like Lean In shows, there is still a strong cultural push to “have it all” in America.  Our goal at PTL is not to tell you that you can’t have it all; our goal is to remind you (1) not to overlook the blessings of what you already have, and (2) to be deliberate about the “all” you are pursuing—it should be the “all” that you define, not the “all” that the world defines for you if you let it.

So ask yourself:  what am I so busy pursuing, and why?

The Day That I Die

I'm a big fan of the Zac Brown Band, and hours of listening has seared the bands' songs into my mind. Along with the catchy melodies, soothing harmonies, and impressive musicianship, I've come to appreciate the philosophy that runs like a thread through their work.  Much like this blog tries to do, many of the band's lyrics reflect a blend of Stoic acceptance of life as it is; an Epicurean appreciation of the pleasures of everyday living; a Christian acknowledgement of God as supreme over all of life; and a growing recognition that time is a precious resource that should not be taken for granted.

Take Day That I Die, from the band's latest album Uncaged, written by Zac Brown, Wyatt Durrette, and Nic Cowan.  After acknowledging the sometimes tough life of a musician on the road, the singer recognizes that the songs come from inside him; he has to sing:


'Cause I believe that I

Was born with a song inside of me.

Never question why, 

I just kept on chasing that melody.

And as time goes by, 

It's funny how time can make you realize, 

We're running out of it.

Anyone in middle age, musician or not, can relate to those last lines:  as time goes by, we begin to realize that time won't last forever.  Once we realize that time has a limit, its value increases.  And as its value increases, we start to think more deliberately about how to spend it.  And there you have the genesis of many a "mid-life crisis."

As the song continues, Zac reminds us that one answer to the realization that time is precious is to make sure we spend it doing something we love.  In his case, playing guitar:

On the day that I die, 

I wanna say that I 

Was a man who really lived and never compromised.

And when I've lived out my days

Until the very end, 

I hope they find me in my home,

A guitar in my hands.

A man who is driven to be a musician by the melodies that seemingly erupt from within him hopes to be playing music to the very end.

Which poses a question:  how do you want to spend the hypothetical day that you die?   When I look around me, it appears that most people want to be found with an iPhone in their hands.  Seriously?  Maybe they are all composing music on GarageBand.......

Time is precious; we don't have an unlimited supply.  Even more daunting, you can't know exactly how much you do have; people like Mike had much less than they expected.   Once you realize that your time has real value, the next step is to be deliberate about how you spend it.  Don't do things just because everyone else does them; examine yourself, taking into account your talents, motivations, responsibilities, desires, hopes, and prayers.  Then spend your valuable time on the things that matter to you, not on things that society says should matter to you.

For me that means trying to be rich in relationships, experiences, and memories.  Yes, I have to work for a living, but I continue to try to be as efficient as possible to free up time for what really matters to me:  talking to my wife, playing with my kids, reading, writing, eating; actually living.  On the day that I die, I hope they find me in my home, surrounded by my family, a book and a pen in my hand.

On the day that you die, how will we find you?