Tag Archives: work

The View from the Thinking Chair

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Having worked from home for nearly five years, I have adopted several strategies for breaking up the otherwise monolithic stretches at the computer working on the emails, spreadsheets, proposals, and the thousand other details necessary to propel my business forward. Many of these involve the conscious and regular scheduling of face-to-face interactions with clients, partners, and teammates, but these have been effectively stifled by the coronavirus seclusion. One continuing, pre-quarantine habit that has helped sustain my mental health is what I call the Thinking Chair, which is my exaggeratedly serious name for the place I take my coffee breaks.

Each afternoon, generally somewhere between 2:30 and 3:30 PM, I get up from my work desk, make some coffee — usually a double espresso — and go sit outside on the patio for at least 30 minutes. Sometimes I have my phone with me to check in on various aspects of the non-work world, and sometimes not, but either way it’s a pause; a time to be away from work, be outside and, well, think. Like a cat, I move my chair into any available spot of sun. I breathe the open air, and listen to the sounds of my yard and the weather, which sometimes include wind and/or rain as my patio is covered and I try to carve out this time regardless of the forecast. When it gets particularly windy, you can hear the older cedars in the surrounding yards creak as they sway, a sound that is simultaneously comforting and worrying. In the current imposed dormancy of the quarantine, the nearby road noise is pleasantly hushed. My regular interludes in the Thinking Chair are also opportunities to let my mind step outside the more orderly confines of focused work, and just randomly play with whatever presently occupies my consciousness. I find that this habit allows me to clear my head, and afterwards return refreshed to work. It engenders a sense of gratitude (I have a roof over my head, I have food to eat, I have work to do, and I have the luxury of taking a coffee break), and I often come up with interesting writing ideas or even, ironically, occasional solutions to work problems during this time.

The first thought that crosses my freshly-caffeinated mind today is that right now I am supposed to be finishing up a long vacation in Italy. I should be watching the sun set on the Adriatic Sea from the balcony of our rented apartment in Ravenna, and thinking about tomorrow morning’s train ride to Bologna and our evening flight back to London and then on to Seattle. I should then be getting on another flight for a family reunion on the northern California coast over Memorial Day Weekend. But I’m not. Those trips were cancelled, along with many others, and instead I’m sitting on the back patio at my home on an overcast and drizzly Northwest afternoon, sipping coffee that comes nowhere near the quality of what I remember from other trips abroad. So many things have changed. So many cancellations and postponements. So many people no longer with us. So much division and hostility among the rest of us.

With so much loss and future uncertainty, the backyard foliage coming into its spring livery offers a more hopeful contrast. The heathers have had their brief bloom and are now settled into their seasonal greenness. The azaleas and barberrys are showing a robust hint of great promise, while the coneflowers seem content to keep their secrets a bit longer. The lavender, rosemary and woolly thyme have all increased their hold on the open space, and appear lush and verdant in the intermittent rain. I marvel at the new growth on our gem magnolias. These young trees were severely battered by last winter’s snows to the point where all three are several feet shorter than they were last year at this time, and are still missing many of their previous branches. We weren’t sure they would even survive.

Our resident squirrel stares at me briefly from his perch atop one of our landscaping rocks, then quickly retreats and sprints his way effortlessly up a sheer stretch of fencing. I am instantly jealous of his apparent immunity to gravity. Back in my mountaineering days I was a decent rock climber, but unlike our squirrel, I seemed to plateau at a certain level of difficulty. The American system of climbing grades is based off the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS), which ranges from class 1 (hiking over flat ground) to class 5 (technical rock climbing), and then provides further incremental gradations for class 5 depending on increased difficulty. A climb in the 5.0 to 5.7 range is considered easy, 5.8 to 5.10 is considered intermediate, 5.11 to 5.12 is hard, and only a handful of the world’s most elite climbers can complete anything of the 5.13 to 5.15 variety.

As a “weekend warrior” when it came to climbing, I could consistently top out routes up to 5.8, but could never successfully complete anything 5.9 or higher. After being frustrated with this for a while, I sought out an instructor at a local climbing gym to see if I could push through this ostensible barrier. After watching me climb several routes, he reached the following conclusion: I didn’t seem to trust my feet. When I asked what that meant, and what I could do to work on it, I very clearly remember him putting his hands on his hips, furrowing his brow, staring me straight in the eye, and saying, “Today, I am going to challenge your definition of a good foothold”.

I had been taught that rock climbing in particular could be broken down into three constituent things: Vision – the bigger-picture puzzle-solving skills to see a way to the top and the sequence of moves required to get there, Mechanics – the ability to understand and use the laws of physics and gravity to assist you in skillfully maneuvering and manipulating your body over the required sequence of moves, and Conditioning – the ability to apply strength when strength is needed, flexibility when flexibility is needed, and the endurance to ration both of these over the time necessary to complete the climb. I had never really considered the trust aspect.

What began was a process of reviewing my footwork mechanics – ensuring my weight was securely held by my arms and the leg opposite the one I was about to move, quickly and smoothly placing the ball or toe of my free foot on the new hold, rotating the foot towards the wall to lock the hold, then shifting my weight to the new hold to free up my other limbs to move – and then practicing these mechanics on progressively smaller and smaller sizes of footholds. I spent hours in the gym practicing, mostly on holds no more than a few feet off the ground. After a few weeks of consistent practice, I was able to advance from “requiring” several exposed inches of rock to support my foot to being comfortable on fractions of an inch, and I ultimately completed several 5.9 routes. As much as the mechanics were critical, I found that that they were almost secondary to trust – the simple, compelling belief that the preparation and placement I had done would actually hold my weight.

My coffee is finished, and I begin the physical and mental transition back to work, taking with me the fresh lessons from both the magnolias and the memories of climbing. Everything, no matter how badly damaged or beset by circumstance, can begin to find its way back. Trips can be rescheduled. More intimate personal connections with family, friends and colleagues will return. The challenge to our contemporary definition of a good foothold has been forced abruptly upon us, and now we must embrace both hope and grief as we rediscover our ability to trust our own feet beneath us.

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Father’s Day, Redux

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I wrote the original Father’s Day blog entry back in 2011 to celebrate what would have been my father’s 81st birthday. It was a soft, adulatory piece that overlooked many of the rougher edges of family life with this man, but while it is the harshest truths that bring the most perspective, there is limited virtue in total disclosure. The seed and focus of the piece was not that he was a flawless or even sympathetic character, but more my growing awareness of habits and behaviors I mockingly attributed to him that I myself was beginning to manifest, and the more subtle ways in which my own contemporary actions appeared to be at least in part the result of his presence in my early life.

On this, my twentieth Father’s Day holiday since his death, this burgeoning awareness still continues. My father was a glazier by trade, and in addition to working for several Sacramento-area firms (Basco, Combustion Engineering, and Western Shower Door are the ones I remember) he also owned his own business. As children, we often spent time in his shop on weekends, though in retrospect I think this was to get us out of my mother’s hair. We would “work” at tasks like sorting screws (separating the various fasteners used in assembling shower door frames from a large pile that had become inexplicably combined) and sweeping the shop floor. In addition to being paid some actual money, there was compensation by way of forklift rides and lunch at McDonalds.

In addition to household chores, these were unknowingly my first lessons in business: being paid an hourly rate for a specific job with a specific definition of completion and success. Both my parents were believers in the nobility of hard work and self-esteem through accomplishment, and my father’s approach to parenting was one of hands-on demonstration accompanied by clichés: “Measure twice, cut once”, “A job worth doing is a job worth doing well”, “Every job has three parts – the preparation, the doing and the clean-up”, etc. To my adult ears these still sound hopelessly simplistic and trite, but words were not my father’s forte. I think he used them to simply fill the air around his hands showing us what needed doing and how it was to be done, whether he was teaching us chess or racquetball or how to line up a bevel cut on the chop saw.

What I am only now beginning to realize is that there were also larger lessons in play. My siblings and I continued to work in his shop on and off for years, including full-time during a few summers all the way into our college years. This was actual work, and not only introduced us to the broader economic reality of taxes and withholding, but also gave us a front-row seat from which to observe the dedication and sacrifice required to run a successful business. My father was the owner, but he was also the primary sales person, did all the invoicing and accounting, and still did much of the actual installation work. I can still see him sitting at his messy office desk, poring over the details of inventory and payroll.

We also got to see the toll this job took on his body. Moving both the materials required to construct mirrors and shower doors into and around the shop as well as lifting the finished products onto and off of his truck rack was seriously physically demanding. Even with employees who eventually took over most of the lifting duties, he developed back issues and severe bursitis in both elbows, which required ongoing cortisone injections to manage the pain and inflammation. His own vices, chief among them drinking, smoking and a penchant for large quantities of red meat, cannot have helped his condition. Although he stopped both drinking and smoking in his later years and remained very physically active, the corrosive course of heart disease that would later claim his life was established early in his working years.

After nearly 30 years of working for other companies, I am approaching the midway point in my first year as a business owner. While I am fortunate both to be in a services industry that doesn’t require inventory (let alone inventory that requires forklifts or other heavy lifting) and I have a business partner that shares responsibility for day-to-day operations, I now sit at my own messy desk and tussle with questions of sales, revenue, margin, staffing, payroll, taxes, insurance, and a thousand other details. I have a new and profound respect for this aspect of my father’s life, and am once again surprised by the ever-evolving parallels to my own.

I don’t know if my father was actually the best businessman or not. I was only really just getting to know him as an adult when he passed away. He died at a relatively young age of sixty-seven, barely fifteen years older than I find myself now. By comparison, his identical twin brother is alive and nearing ninety. What I do know is that he worked hard, provided jobs for other people, and kept his business going for several decades. Whether this atones for any other shortcomings is not for me to say. Another fatherly aphorism comes to mind: ”There are only two kinds of jobs – shower before and shower after”.  I’ve done my share of both, and like to think I’ve done each with the same thoughtfulness and integrity. I can confidently say that this approach did not come wholly from the tutelage of my father (my mother was clearly a strong role model as well in this regard), but there is no question that he was a major influence. For this reason I hold him among the better coaches and mentors I’ve had, and on this holiday above most his absence is keenly felt.

FD2My father and I at my wedding in September 1993. This would
turn out to be the last picture taken of just the two of us.