Mapping words to feelings

I’m a Baby Boomer and a guy. That means I grew up largely without a vocabulary for emotions. If you don’t have the words, it’s hard to make sense out of certain things.

There were things that startled me like bugs and snakes. I learned that the spike in my heart rate and the shaking in my hands meant I was scared. When I was asked to get up in front of a group of people and speak, I wondered what that had to do with bugs or snakes. Was something making me afraid? Learned a new word. I was anxious.

Circumstances kept putting me in front of audiences. “Scared” was no longer the right word. Nor was “anxious.” The feelings remained similar. Raised heart rate, shaking hands. I needed a new word. The one I landed on was “energized.” I can’t tell you whether I chose it for myself or someone suggested it. A new word offered a new perspective. “Fear” and “anxiety” were things to avoid, “energy” was something to use and direct.

The words I chose could affect how my body responded.

This was not a connection I made quickly. I loved words so much that I was quite content to live inside my head. Connecting what was going on in my head with what was going on in my body didn’t occur to me unless my body’s reactions were adamant. Fine gradations of wording made sense. Learning that those gradations might map to equally fine gradations of feelings has been a long, slow, still incomplete, process.

Exercising heart and brain in equal measure

My Dad served in the Navy during WWII. He was stationed in San Diego. After the war he returned home and completed an engineering degree at the University of Delaware on the GI Bill. After earning his degree he left Delaware and his family, ended up in St.Louis where he met my mother, and started our family. He chose to move half a continent away from his parents, a sister and several brothers, including his twin.

It was many years later before I learned that alcohol was one of the major drivers of his decision to leave. Dad was a very controlled guy. Funny and charming in a quiet Irish way but he liked a certain degree of order in this world. Control the environment and the world was a better place. Mom was more on the crazy side but those are stories for another time and place. His simple solution to deal with a family environment too fond of alcohol was to leave and create one that put alcohol in a better and much less central place.

I did drink in college and had the usual pleasant and unpleasant encounters. If there is a genetic component to alcohol abuse, I never triggered it. I had instead inherited some portion of my Dad’s preference for controlling my environment. As an aside, I don’t drink at all these days and haven’t for forty or so years. Again, a story for another time.

What’s on my mind today is the question of using the environment to establish control. Maybe it’s the Catholic notion of avoiding occasions of sin or avoiding temptation. The price of environmental control is that you don’t develop the internal controls and sensitivities to situations and circumstances that might prove more adaptive. If you’re quick-witted enough you can talk your way out of trouble when you’d be better served having to deal with the consequences of the humanly stupid thing you just did. If your brain is over-developed, your heart doesn’t get the exercise it needs to manage the complexities of the bigger world.

Nail it before it rots

I’ve been told that procrastination can be a symptom of perfectionism; you can’t turn something in until it is perfect. I wish I had known of that excuse when my father first called me on my tendency to put things off. Forty some odd years later I found an answer in ADD, but when I was about twelve my tendency to put off finishing things was a sore spot.

The incident that sticks was the day my father interrupted my working on a model airplane. He asked me to look up the word “procrastination.” Without looking up or skipping a beat, I answered “I’ll do it later.” Let’s just say that my attention was immediately and forcibly redirected to the dictionary on my desk. It’s a word that I’ve known for a long time.

While I was never especially adept at finishing things ahead of time, I did become very practiced at meeting deadlines. About the same time I was so memorably learning the word “procrastination,” my teachers also noted that I was a pretty competent writer. I was nudged into writing for our school paper and yearbook. I was tasked with editing the schools annual literary magazine. In college, I dated a girl who was the editor of the college yearbook and she assigned me quite a few articles when she was on a tight schedule. This pattern repeated itself in my professional work when I began to write consulting reports for clients.

The thread through all of this was my ability to produce a deliverable on deadline. There was a quality threshold to hit but deadlines ruled. The curtain goes up at eight because the show must go on. If the lead is throwing up in a bucket the understudy goes on that night.

If you could meet or exceed the quality gate by the deadline, you became the go to guy. Practice made you better. It also made you faster. “Done” was the metric. I became a carpenter not a cabinetmaker. Similar skill set, different expectations.

I learned my actual carpentry skills building stage sets. Again, the show must go on. You don’t want a set to fall on an actor mid-performance. But no one is going to live in that room when the run is over. The expression you will hear in the shop backstage is “nail it before it rots.”

A state of constant confusion

“Where did you prep?”

I was walking to some orientation event in my first week of university. I was with a new acquaintance I had met on the soccer field earlier that day. I can’t recall his name or anything other than that odd question. I hadn’t even started classes and I was already hit with questions I didn’t understand. “Prep” for what? I had showered. My shirt was clean. What was I missing?

Turns out the question was about what elite prep school had I come from. Definitely not in Kansas (or Missouri, my home state) anymore. In his world, if you played soccer you must have learned the game in prep school. This was 1971 and soccer was not a widely known or played sport in the US.

I spent a good portion of my time those days in some level of confusion. I was a reasonably bright kid. Introverted and fond of books of all sorts. A very perceptive nun in my parochial school persuaded by parents to channel me into a private boys school in St.Louis run by English Benedictine monks. Turns out I had indeed “prepped” without knowing so. I did so, however, with none of the social and cultural shaping that can be part of that environment. Intellectually overdeveloped and lagging or backwards everywhere else.

Fifty five years later, I’m closer to balance overall. There was an overall odd benefit to my unbalanced development. I became comfortable with confusion and not knowing. This was a long and slow transformation for someone rewarded for knowing answers. Turns out that clueless is just a starting point for figuring things out.

There used to be a show on NPR called Car Talk. Ostensibly about cars and car repair, it was really an ongoing seminar on how to figure things out by asking questions. There’s a quote from the show that is pretty good advice:

I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions. . .Indeed, I feel I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren’t even aware were problems. To sum it all up . . . In some ways I feel we are confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.

You have to see the mess to manage the mess

Most days, at some point, my right shoulder will hurt. This is because of a bicycle accident twenty years ago, when I managed to shatter my shoulder by falling at zero miles per hour. With the help of a metal plate and half a dozen screws my orthopedic surgeon reassembled the jigsaw puzzle I had created . A year’s worth of physical therapy and rehab restored 90–95 percent of range of motion and function. I happen to be left-handed so there’s little that I can’t do, although I remain suspicious of bicycles. Last week, i was up on scaffolding installing siding on a house being built by Habitat for Humanity..

Pain is a message from your body that something needs attention. How much attention is a function of the level of pain plus whatever else in your life is demanding attention. The accident occurred just outside our house as my wife and I were beginning our ride. Before we could leave to visit the emergency department at the hospital, my wife insisted that she had to change out of her new spandex cycling outfit. How she thought she looked in that outfit demanded more attention than the fact that my right arm wasn’t working correctly. I still tease her about that.

Attention is what catches my interest about this moment. That pain message was adamant and demanded my immediate attention. A serious enough injury can cut through a lot. But it’s also a reminder to me that I struggle to manage my attention. My ability to ignore demands for attention can be both a strength and a weakness. This accident occurred when I was 53. That was perhaps three or four years after working out that I had a pretty clear case of ADD.

I grew up in an era and environment where ADD and ADHD were not something available to account for certain behaviors. They certainly weren’t something you thought of when trying to make sense out of someone with advanced academic degrees and a fair degree of career success.

The nuns in elementary school in the 1960s were quite comfortable managing your attention for you, although if you were quick-witted you could often fake your way out of most threatening moments. Natural curiosity can direct your attention in lots of interesting and productive ways. The theory, I suppose, is that you gradually learn to manage your attention on your own. Unfortunately, lots of people around you have strong opinions about where your attention should be directed. Most of us learn how to work within those opinions and expectations.

Some of us don’t. Or can’t.

My attention is a bit like a broken sense of pain. Some signals don’t register. Others get stuck on or off. I might easily miss a fire alarm if I am hyper-focused on a task that interests me. Or miss an opportunity to flirt with a pretty girl because I am absorbed in a book (that’s happened more than once in my past). General awareness helps a little bit. Medications not at all. A fair amount of mess in my life can be traced to this deficient sense of attention.

Becoming clueful

If you’re clever in school it can take a long time to grasp that you are clueless elsewhere. Gathering clues proceeds slowly.

An example that comes to mind was a math class in my second year in college. Professor Tucker mentioned that he had asked Professor Kuhn from the Economics Department to cover for him in Friday’s class. This was when it dawned on me that I was learning the Kuhn-Tucker algorithm in our textbook from its creators. Over the years, I’ve shared this story as an example of the quality of the education I was receiving. It only now occurs to me that it was equally a marker of my cluelessness.

My wife is on record that, based on photographic evidence of my sartorial choices then, she would have crossed the street to avoid me in college.

I could go on.

It’s hard to be surprised by something that you don’t notice. Professionally, I spent much of my career noticing systems and processes and designing better ones. To use Wendell Berry’s term, I “solved for pattern” I believed in organizations that wanted to behave more rationally. I cleaned up messes.

Where I got, and get, in trouble is with those who thrive on creating messes. This is less of an issue in retirement. I can avoid many chaos creators. In the wider world, that has become difficult of late. In the end it depends on getting better at noticing.

Trusting the Flow

I’ve told this story before. This blog post from 2018 (Preparing to be bold in the moment) is likely the most complete version.

It was a clash with the Off-Broadway director of the original musical I was stage managing thirty minutes before the curtain was set to rise on the final dress rehearsal before opening night. Tony was panicking that we weren’t going to be ready and generally getting in the way of the controlled chaos happening on stage and in the wings. I told Tony that it was my stage at this point and he was free to fire me at 8:30 if the curtain didn’t go up then but to get off of my stage now. (I might have phrased things less politely). Tony left in a huff. The curtain went up on time. I kept the job. The show was a success.

Many people spend a lot of energy fretting about what might go wrong. Tony was certainly one.

My brain seems to work differently. Maybe it was growing up with six younger siblings. Maybe it was studying probability theory. Maybe it’s tied to the ADD I didn’t know I had. Regardless, I don’t spend time contemplating and enumerating things that might go wrong.I work with a high level plan and adapt to things as they unfold. In larger settings I surround myself with highly capable partners. So far that’s worked pretty effectively regardless of the actual mess that occurs.

Hearing notes you can’t produce

I started my education in Catholic parochial schools. They were mostly very good to me. When I was about eleven there was an incident that wasn’t so positive that’s stayed with me.

We had chorus each day. Or, perhaps it was once a week. Those details are murky. At eleven my voice changed and dropped a couple of octaves. Perhaps a little earlier than some, but not unexpected. The solution from the nun running the chorus was to tell me to stop making any noise. Problem solved for the chorus.

To this day, sixty plus years later, I don’t sing. Even in the shower. I’ve taught in front of classes from twenty to two hundred people. I’ve given keynote addresses to a thousand. But don’t ask me to sing. Solo or back of the chorus. It doesn’t matter.

Perhaps oddly, I’ve spent a great deal of time backstage in the theater. That includes stage managing multiple musicals. I had cues tied to verses or key changes or other musical moments. I love music. I just can’t do music.

We all encounter these moments. Some paths close. Others open. There’s a messiness in the day-to-day that’s unavoidable. Fighting it or going with the flow are both poor strategies. Learning to strike a dynamic balance is the game. Can you recognize the notes even if you can’t produce them?

Syncing up

It was late 1962, perhaps early 1963, and our elementary school class was on a field trip to the natural history museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Probably the origin of my love for museums of all kinds. The only thing I recall of this one, however, was the cafeteria where we were able to choose our lunch from a vast array of offerings. I had never encountered such a thing and I was about to receive a lesson in “eyes bigger than my stomach.” I reached out and filled my tray from that vast array.

The bus ride home was not pleasant, although I don’t recall any major tragedy. Not yet ten years old, I was already the eldest of seven children. As the eldest I was often the one to first encounter new experiences. As one of seven, finances and logistics often limited what those experiences could be. There was a certain narrowness to my world that wasn’t easy to perceive. Books could open aspects of the wider world. Being good at school things brought attention from teachers. Being an obedient eldest child kept me out of trouble.

There’s a lot to be said for being left to your own devices. But it can also keep you from encountering much of the real world. Squeaky wheels get attention. Quiet ones get less. And there’s no one to notice or tell you that you are missing important experiences at navigating a world full of other people. How do you figure out what it is to be lonely when you’re in the midst of little brothers and sisters and grown ups busy dealing with whoever is making noise.

This sounds sadder than it was. My intellectual and emotional development was out of sync. I wasn’t qualified to notice. Those who might have had bigger issues to deal with. If you aren’t obviously contributing to the mess, you get to do what you please. You let curiosity take you where it will. Which can be quite a long way. With some luck, and attention from the right people, things eventually sync up.

Addressing the Mess

Forty some odd years ago, I was part of a team that developed a new accounting system that let the State of New York pay its bills. The project took two years and involved over a hundred staff and consultants. One of the early steps in the project mapped all the steps from developing a budget for the Legislature to enact into law to the paperwork for cutting a check to a specific vendor for the paper to put in the copier outside our temporary offices.

My team met with legislators in the Capitol in Albany, analysts in the Budget Office, accountants in places like the State Police, and clerks in their warrens. As we traced the flow of paper we recorded the process on a wall in a large conference room. The final map was six feet high and twenty feet from end to end.

We transferred that map into a smaller version that went to the Graphics Department in our offices in New York City. Commercial artists there set the hand drawn flowchart into small type and printed the final flowchart as a three foot by five foot poster. We printed a hundred or so copies of that poster and delivered the first one to the Director of the Budget Office. The word “Accounting” in the title was spelled with one “C”.

Who knows how many eyes had reviewed how many drafts of this piece of work? How many times had I looked at it? Today, we could update a digital file and move on. Then, we simply moved on. I took what heat flowed from this mistake.

Messiness has been on my mind lately. It’s probably what triggered this memory. At the time, I was probably a lot more embarrassed than I can recall today. You can opt to be sloppy. You can attempt to be a perfectionist. Or you can get on with it. The world persists in being messy regardless of what you think. How do you factor that reality into your approach to work? Over the next few weeks I intend to dive into that particular mess.