The Direction of Intention

601. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sometimes I worry myself. Last week I was flying through O’Hare airport. I had a fairly long lay over (and isn’t THAT an interesting term!). I was tired. It was dark outside; in airports during the winter 6:00pm and midnight feel like the same thing, just as in old age homes prunes and iced tea taste the same. It’s odd. So, it was midnight or something. My eyes were fried so I couldn’t read. Besides, I was the kind of tired that, if I lay down during my lay over, I’d wake up and my flight would have left me behind. So I was walking and looking at stuff.

Here’s the part that worries me: I saw a sandwich. I wasn’t hungry but I knew my flight was approximately 5 hours long and I could imagine myself getting hungry before the plane landed. And what if the plane never landed? I should have a sandwich. Here’s more of the part that worries me: at the Airport Fresh food stand, where nothing is really fresh, where I saw the sandwich, the sandwich I saw, the sandwich I chose was sitting all alone. There were others further down the shelf, but this one, this lonely little sandwich, sat all alone. It was too small to compete. The other sandwiches were muscly things wrapped tightly in plastic; they were bursting to get out of their wrappers. My sandwich was the runt of the litter, sliced chicken breast with red bell pepper. It was destined to be an engineer. And since no one was talking to it, since it had been abandoned by the in-crowd, I bought it.

As I walked away from Airport Fresh, I had a realization: I am Charlie Brown! My ghost costume has too many holes! On this day of All Hallows Eve I will get rocks instead of candy in my plastic pumpkin head trick-or-treat candy bucket because I projected a story (my story?) on a lonely sub-standard sandwich that a host of other discerning travelers were wise enough to leave behind. I chose the Christmas tree with few branches and no needles because I thought it needed a home. Or, an alternate narrative: mainstream sandwiches bore me and I am much more interested in the deviants in society. More projection perhaps but one with a healthier turn: I chose that narrative.

After all of that, I will not tell you what horrors I suffered when I actually got hungry on my flight. That sandwich pleaded with me for a long time and I had to explain that it had a purpose to fulfill. And, as difficult as the path might seem now, it would thank me later. It went quietly. So I think – all in all – it was a very worrisome affair. Spooky even. Ghoulish when you consider what happened to that poor lonely sandwich.

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553. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

My inner sociologist awoke with a start. He is a sleepy fellow and enjoys his nap more than most folks. I was crossing the courtyard of the apartment complex next door; it has been my shortcut to the other side of the peninsula for more than a decade, a shortcut that I have taken 5 times a week, every week, for 10 years. I am on a first name basis with the caretaker of the property. Today, as I crossed the courtyard I passed a man on talking on a cell phone. He was angry and shouting at the person on the other end. As I passed he snapped shut his phone and called out to me, “Hey! Do you live here?” I stopped and told him I lived in the apartments next door. He responded, “You’re walking on our sidewalk!” That was the moment my inner sociologist woke up and rubbed his eyes, “Huh? Wha…?” His hair was a mess; nap head.

“These are our sidewalks!” the angry man sneered, “I live here. We have to protect our privacy.”

My inner sociologist rolled his eyes and said, “Why are test cases always so predictable.” I cautioned him to watch, to make no assumptions. I said to the angry man, “My name’s David. I’m your neighbor. I pass this way everyday.” My inner sociologist took out his notepad and a blunt pencil, grudgingly poised to write notes about the encounter.

The angry man opened his phone. He did not dial a number so my inner sociologist wrote, “Avoids eye contact.” While staring at his phone, Angry Man said, “We’ve had a rash of vandalism and have to know who’s on our property.”

I said, “Well, I’ll keep my eyes open for any suspicious characters.” My inner sociologist rolled his eyes and called me a manipulator, taking a note about my less-than-subtle status game.

Still staring at his phone, Angry Man repeated emphatically, “These are our sidewalks,” and turned his back and quickly walked away, disappearing around a corner.

My inner sociologist snapped closed his notepad and sighed with disgust, “You woke me up for this? Another angry person finding things to fear is not worthy of my study! You interrupted my nap for a game of guard-the-sidewalk!”

“It justifies his anger.” I said. “Guarding the sidewalk gives him a sense of power and purpose. Plus, didn’t you see how he used his phone as a place to disappear?” I asked. Isn’t that interesting to you?”

“Old News!” shouted my inner sociologist! “Blame and disappear, blame and disappear! Claiming territory that does not matter – it’s an old song and it bores me. Besides, who’s not hiding inside their technology these days?” he seethed, crawling back onto his couch, adjusting his pillow. “I find it depressing,” he sighed, closing his eyes.

“Well, I thought it was interesting precisely because it is so normal.” I said. “Isn’t his need to mark territory and defend it against his neighbor, me, a possible ally, a potential friend, isn’t that worth studying? Isn’t it worth talking about?” He was already snoring – or making snoring noises so I’d leave him alone. “Well, I think it’s interesting.” I said, slightly wounded, suddenly more aware of the sidewalk than I had been before meeting the Angry Man.

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544. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Talking with my peers who, like me, identify as young but our conversations are sounding suspiciously like the conversations our parents used to have (“my body hurts…,” “I don’t have the energy for it…,” “We were never like that…”), our topic turned to “young people plugged into their ear buds who seem to be lost in a world of their own.” Good contrarian that I am, I had another point of view on the “young” escapees.

Nobutoshi Kihara developed the Sony Walkman way back in the 1970’s and the catalyst for the technology was to create a way for people to listen to their music without disturbing others. It was an invention born from consideration, a distinctly Japanese idea. Translated to an American consumer it morphed into a way for people to tune out the noise and chaos of contemporary life. I offered this notion to my pals: most of us now live in an urban environment, we can’t walk down the street without advertisements competing for our attention no matter where we turn (a boat is now trolling the Puget Sound beaches pulling a with a billboard…nothing is sacred), our world is plagued by a non-stop political campaign defined by ugly accusations, political parties that are either useless or crazy and certainly no longer interested in compromise or governing, news organizations that gave up their mission decades ago and now believe their job is to entertain (so they shout and organize fights), bankers that no longer serve their communities but instead pillage from them, schools driven by the one thing we know that impedes education (a focus on an outcome instead creating a process of discovery), cops with guns, crooks with guns, moms with guns, an economic machine that needs war to be healthy, terror, terror everywhere,…who wouldn’t want to put in ear buds and play a different soundtrack? I suggested that the sanest people on the street are the ones who are refusing to listen to the noise and instead are at least proactive enough to take care of themselves.

When I asked my pals how much television they watched each day, they grumbled knowing what I was implying. There are many ways to tune out. There are many forms of complacency.

Yesterday I took a short hike on a forest trail and it only took a few minutes for me to get quiet inside. With no one screaming for my attention, with no one screaming at others or honking or emailing or proclaiming, pontificating, threatening, inflating, running to get there, racing to get here, I was amazed at how much I wanted to tune in to my surroundings. I wanted nothing between me and the natural rhythm; my pace slowed, my senses opened and I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

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523. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

The first time I stepped over a person sleeping on the street I was horrified. I grew up in the burbs; if someone was collapsed on the street it meant they needed help. It was early in the morning, my first day in San Francisco. I was 22 years old. I rushed to the man laying on the cement and my friend Roger grabbed my arm, “Keep walking,’ he said, “There’s nothing you can do.” I stepped over the man and kept walking. It was unnatural. I didn’t believe that there was nothing to be done. And, I kept walking. Roger was quick to point out the people asleep in doorways, on benches, beneath cardboard,…; once my eyes were opened I saw people scattered all over the city, hundreds of people asleep on the street. It was as if an earthquake hit the city and its residents were afraid to go back into their homes. “What happened?” I asked. “Reagan cut funding for the shelters,” Roger said. “The economy sucks.” Even then those answers seemed too simplistic, completely void of responsibility.

This is how we learn the rules of community.

That was 1983. Today I walked by the courthouse in downtown Seattle. The park next to the courthouse was like a refugee camp. Every park bench served to support makeshift cardboard shelters. People slept beneath every tree and formed a line adjacent to the fences. Sleeping during the day is necessary if you have no home to return to at night. For a moment I thought it was a performance art piece, the actors having placed themselves on the ground in an orderly composition. They were so still. I felt no horror and had no impulse to help. Instead, I was more concerned with looking at them for too long; I am not supposed to notice. I am a man of my times and have internalized the rules of community.

Earlier in the day I’d read a passage about Marshal McLuhan: he wrote of the human tendency to dismiss an idea or experience by naming it. He called it “label-libel.” Attach the right label to it and you needn’t think about it any more.

“Homeless,” I said, feeling nothing. “The economy sucks,” I intoned. “Nothing to be done,” I whispered, wishing for the days when I had access to my horror.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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514. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I am a master of writing myself notes. I fill multiple notebooks every year. They are choked full of excited scribbles, enthusiastic lines and arrows, doodles and stars: all attempts to catch my thoughts before I lose them. Thoughts are slippery devils that jump into my path and then disappear while I look for a pencil.

I have a variety of strategies to capture them. I track them through the dense forest of my mind. Sometimes I set traps for them. I dig tiger pits. I have sexy decoys and have learned mating calls: an evasive thought like “the default story” will come out of hiding when I tempt it with the amorous cry of “the necessary action.” Easy prey!

Of course, there is a serious flaw in my thought-hunting prowess. Open any notebook in my stack, flip to a random page, point to any note and ask me what it means. I will stare at the excited scribble – often a terrific phrase, perhaps useful for a line of poetry, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was supposed to cue for me. What was the revelation, the connection, the greater ah-ha?

Even when captured those trickster thoughts leave a small alphabetic footprint, a cryptic mark and somehow the greater meaning slips away.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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