License Suspended

"He's going to tell him about it today."
"I hope he knows what he's talking about and who he's talking to."
"Huh?  Of course he does, we've been over this lots of times.  He knows."
"Well, I can't be sure." 
"Why not?  He has been telling us he would for weeks."
"And, I'm supposed to know what he's telling him about?  Because I sure don't."
"I guess you don't.  How many times do I have to tell you?  He knows what to do."
"Well, who's he?"
"Who's who?"

I tell you, it's little wonder I get lost in the wilderness in a conversation like this one.  There was not a single noun to grab hold of, I was lost at the bottom of a mountain of pronouns.  Grammarians tell us that "pronouns are used in place of a noun to make a sentence less cumbersome and repetitive."  I think it's supposed to be understood that your sentence, however less repetitive and/or cumbersome, must still be one a person can follow;  I have found seven to nine kinds of pronouns,  My story above was chock-full of personal pronouns, so let's stick with those.  Don't get me started on the other six or eight (like possessive pronouns--does anybody out there know how to keep "there," "they're" and "their" straight?

Pronouns are, at times, the bane of my existence.  I have a few people in my life whose "pronoun-ing" license ought to be suspended.    It's either that or I will have to try to make the pronoun version of "Who's On First," which is my favorite comic routine of all time.  What was the famous line that led to the fateful charge of the light brigade?  My belief is there was a pronoun involved.  

It begins innocently enough, with the personal pronouns and the first person pronoun--"I."  It's hard to mistake that one.  It's usually clear who is the topic of discussion, or the actor in the scene, so to speak.  "I am going home," or "I am confused."  No need to point out who is involved.  It becomes a bit less clear when we move on to the plural first person, "we."  There is a famous line from a joke about the Lone Ranger and his loyal companion, Tonto.   "Who's we, kemosahbe?"  On occasion, someone will start a sentence like this.  "We need to ....," or "We're going to ..."  The problems arise when not everyone in the room is part of the "we."  Have you been there?  My thought is that people who misuse "we" are often just assuming that everyone agrees with them.  Can you say "self-centered?"  "I" is safer than "we," at least when it comes to clear communication.  

A similar problem arises in the second person pronoun, "you."  If only the two of us are in the room, and the speaker says "you," you are pretty clear about who "you" is.  (Don't you just love it when you can say "you is" and proclaim it is correct usage?).  If the scene moves to a room full of people and a person raises his voice and says "you are crazy," one cannot be sure if the you is being used in a singular, plural or collective sense.  When I first arrived here in the South, I thought native speakers might have a leg up on the rest of the English-speaking world.  They had a way of distinguishing "you" in the singular from "you" in the plural or collective sense.  (You have to have heard of "you-all" or, more commonly, "y'all.")  For months, I thought this was a minor foothold on the mountain of pronouns.  But then it happened.  I began to notice native speakers using "y'all" when there were only two of us in the room.  At first, I would look over my shoulder, thinking (nay, hoping) someone had stepped into the room to join us.  But, no.  "Y'all" is used in the singular, too.   There is no easier way to climb the mountain here.  Now I realize, there is only one way you can be sure you is being used in the singular.  "You" is only clear when there is only one person besides the speaker in the room. 

As demonstrated in the little conversation with which I opened this note, the third person pronoun is never safe without a liberal sprinkling of antecedents.  I realize that many people don't know an antecedent from an ant, but it is the toll one must pay to have a license to pronoun.  Please, teachers of grammar out there, bring back the antecedents.  I will even accept antecedents that don't agree with their pronouns, I don't mind a disagreement, as long as we are climbing the mountain, so to speak, and not running around in circles (or bases, if you prefer Abbott and Costello's paradigm).  

Conversation

It's funny how adults learn.  I'm teaching literacy on a volunteer basis two evenings a week.  Being a structured kind of guy, I prepare a lesson plan for each session (the process takes me an hour or so at the moment), and struggle manfully to follow it in our two hour sessions.  The "manfully" part is a clue--the class consists of five women.  Staying ahead of the group and trying to steer is a challenge, we tend to get distracted.  

That's OK, however, instructor-led learning is not the real model here.  Adults learn more readily when they are in charge of the direction you take.  Learner-centered is the model.  When we were being trained as tutors, the model was very democratic, with the students steering the course.  But that does not take into account the tendency that most of us have in an unfamiliar situation to leave speaking up to the other people in the room.  If I ask the students in the class what they would like to do next, their eyes are downcast, and nobody steps forward and makes a suggestion.  It's asking a little much of a new student to direct the process.  I have been using the structure of the course to show a regular pattern, and I ask at the end of each session if what we are doing has value.  My sense was that sooner or later they would begin to point in which direction they want to go.  

One of the things we do to start each session is to talk a bit about whatever comes to mind, getting to know each other a little better and practicing speaking English.  I don't need the practice, but I do it anyway (that was a joke).  One thing I find myself doing is a lot of self-disclosure.  My sense is that it should make them more comfortable in the setting.  Consequently, they already know more about me than some people I have known for several years.  

The only down side to this talking habit is that we get side tracked by returning to it during the rest of our session.  Someone will bring a topic back up and we'll spend time talking more about it, even if I can't deduce how we got back on the subject.  When I was in college, one of my classmates specialized in asking multiple questions to slow down the instructor and, thus limit the amount of material the instructor could cover before the next exam.  No such motivation for this group, but it does keep you from following the old lesson plan.  

As we were talking last night, I mentioned something one of the learners had said and offered a suggestion on a better way to say it.  Five minutes later, two of the participants mentioned they had a habit of doing the same thing, so my suggestion had been very helpful.  I had been worried that I had singled out one of them for a mistake, and that this might lead to some embarrassment, etc.  Instead, they pointed out this was one of the most helpful parts of the sessions.  So it turns out that, more important than a lesson plan, a little conversation makes all the difference.  I'm going to have to get better at it.

So Here We All Are Again

When was the last time you flew?  How did it go?  While standing around an airport terminal to make sure our friend got off OK (she didn't), I saw and heard some special things.  First my friend was informed that her flight was overbooked (not unusual) and that, since she had not checked in on line, she was first in line to be taken off the plane if no one volunteered.  Volunteers were solicited with the promise of a $600 voucher for future travel.  No one volunteered.

In spite of the fact that no one had volunteered, my friend was waved onto the plane.  She waved goodbye, but, being the skeptical (or is it cynical?) type, I said, let's wait until the door closes.  Sure enough, five minutes later, the gate agent strolled back up the steps and escorted our friend back through the gate into the waiting area.  We watched from a distance as she and the gate agent looked at options while her plane taxied away...  After fifteen minutes, my friend walked back into the ticketing area and asked if she could stay a day longer.  She explained she would not be able to get another flight until the following evening, and that she needed to go to the check-in desk to retrieve her bag.  

By this time, new passengers were lining up to check in for other flights.  We waited in line for ten minutes more, and I tired of waiting.  I stood next to the ticket agent for a minute or two and asked him, while he was between customers if he wouldn't mind retrieving my friend's bag, in light of the fact she had been kicked off her flight.  He stepped back, found her bag, and handed it to me.  As I waved to my friend, she said the gate agent had told her to get her voucher  out here, so she had to stay in line.  When she finally reached the front of the line, the counter person, who appeared to be in charge, informed her she would have to wait until the passengers on their next flight were checked in.  She stepped out of line and joined me, as we silently simmered near the counter.  An old friend entered the terminal, and we had a pleasant conversation about life in a small airport--he had just recently been hired to handle bags for this very carrier, the sole provider at our little place.

After an added wait of roughly twenty minutes, the original ticket agent waved us up, apologized profusely, and proceeded to write my friend a check for $1300.00--not a travel voucher, a c-h-e-c-k.    Can you guess where our first stop was?  My bank cashed the check, after a little pleading and a look at the balance in my accounts.  They informed me if the check bounced, I'd see that money subtracted from my balance, along with a $35 bank charge.  We have abandoned all plans to make a formal complaint, money will do that to you.  So, here we all are again.  Extraordinary, don't you think?

Lessons learned--consider not checking in on line?  Don't volunteer if you are the voted most likely to get kicked off,  Don't agree to drive to another airport, and realize that cash might just be available instead of a "travel voucher."  

Is this a great country or what?

What's Luck Got To Do With It

We’ve known for some time that fitness doesn’t mean longevity.  The fact that one of the men who is credited for starting America’s fitness craze in the 1970’s, Jim Fixx—author of the Complete Book of Running—died at the age of 52 didn’t really faze too many people.  He had spent the previous ten years extolling the benefits of cardiovascular exercise, including “a considerable increase in the average life expectancy.”  Most concluded he was just “unlucky,” although a closer look suggests there were genetic factors in his death (his father died of heart failure at 43), and some earlier habits that had inflicted damage on his body.  This explanation allowed people to ignore his death, possibly ascribing it to bad luck, and still subscribe to his message. 

Last week, another data point showed up on my screen, when a good friend of mine dropped dead getting off the treadmill at the hotel where he was staying.   Here was a believer in fitness who had a “widowmaker,” a sudden complete occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery.  The thing about the widowmaker is that it can lead to death in minutes, so survival is dependent upon how quickly surgical intervention can be had.  Having it happen when you are alone leaves you without much chance of survival.  There is no good explanation for why his attack occurred while he was alone.  It was just luck.  

As I thought about it this week, I remembered a book I first picked up several years ago and read.  But, one thing led to another, and I got preoccupied with other things.  I not only forgot having the book and how it affected me, I forgot the main message of the book.  I let it sit on my bookshelf amongst all the other books I had collected when I was trying to decide how to do this retirement thing.  

Then I was telling a friend about what I just recently decided to do exercise-wise, based on a lecture I heard in D.C. by a prominent brain research scientist.  She reminded me about this book and I picked it up again.  I immediately understood why she had brought it up. This book had made the same point in 2007.  The authors have an almost magical way of getting that message across, while providing the science that goes along with it.  It’s called, Younger Next Year, and it is written by a retired attorney and his doctor.  The attorney, Chris Crowley, has lived its message over a period of years and makes no bones about his message, he wants to make you understand that seventy percent of what we think of as aging in this country is not aging, it’s decay—from lack of use and abuse.  He and his physician, an internist and gerontologist, go on to offer an engaging and informative view of how you can change your life and avoid the sort of decline you see in the lives of many who reach the last third of their lives.   

A quick review of his book might lead you to conclude that you will live longer if you follow his rules.  But, Crowley points out in his own book that you can just as easily quote “grow a tangerine in your brainpan and be dead in the morning or ski into a tree…” unquote, if you are following his rules, so no, there are no guarantees.   See what a charming way he has of getting his point across?

What does all this have to do with luck, or what does luck have to do with it?  Until quite recently, I would view books like this as the means to an end.   They allow some of us to deny the fact that life has an end.  If we will only do this or follow those rules, we will live a lot longer. 

If you know me, you know I have taken exercise much more seriously in the past three or four years.  Only recently I’ve taken a different tack in enhancing my efforts.   Now I shoot for 45 minute of aerobic exercise at 80 to 85% of theoretical maximum heart rate four days each week, in addition to the other forms of exercise I do.  Do I expect to live longer?  Noooooo. 

But, back to Younger Next Year, the book is about enhancing the quality of your life, not necessarily extending it.  His view is that life expectancy is a matter of luck, but the quality of the life you lead as you approach your 90’s (if you do) is a matter of choice.   You can choose to let decay take over and see your quality of life arc downward for your last 20 years or you can follow his rules and become a little younger each year and live into your 80’s as you would in your 50’s, by becoming “younger next year.” 

Chris Crowley’s life has, luckily, worked out as it’s laid out in the book.  He wrote it in 2005, when he was 72, and it described his situation as it had evolved in the years since he and his doctor got together, some ten years earlier.  Today, he is 80 and he still skis and does other things that men fifteen (15) years his junior would not attempt.   He’s lucky, but he understands what many gurus of fitness seem not to, and that is that “Luck never gives, it only lends.”

Three Laws of Luck

Anybody out there believe in luck?  I do.  It’s the only explanation for some things I’ve come across.   

What about the notion that, like fate, it predetermines things?  It’s written in the stars perhaps?  Do you believe that?  

Or do you believe that luck is just the best explanation for things that already happened? 

I believe in luck in my own way.  I’ve learned some things about luck and I’m here to tell you about them, which does not necessarily, however, make this your lucky day.

It was baseball that first taught me about the complexities of luck.  Luck showed its face in our lowly games.  From the lucky hits I would scratch out when I played with my older brothers and actually managed to get on base, to the lucky catches others made with their eyes closed, just sticking the glove up to protect themselves.  Later I learned about luck in the big leagues.  I learned from the movie about Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, and his famous line—the one everybody remembers-- “Sure I’ve had a bad break.  Yet, today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” I didn’t know much about ALS then, but I knew he had died less than 2 years later.  This week, I looked up the full text of his speech and remembered why his farewell made me think about luck in a new way back then. His whole message was about how he had come to know so many good people in his life.  To this man, luck was not hitting or winning or developing a terminal illness, luck was the phenomenal people he came to know.   So here’s the 1st Law of Luck--Luck is about the people in your life.

To most people, luck means many other things.

Luck is a term people apply to events that happen by chance and not by design. Looking back at a thing and being unable to point to the exact reasons that it came out as it did and attributing it to luck is a commonly accepted use of the term.  In that sense, I count myself a lucky man, just as Lou Gehrig did.  Some amazingly good things have happened to me, and, like Lou Gehrig, I have been privileged to know and have people in my life who have been a great gift.  It was nothing I earned or deserved; fortune just smiled on me and put them in my life.   

But you can’t just leave your life to chance and wait for good things to happen, can you?

I found a Japanese proverb I like—“To wait for luck is like waiting for death.”  Think about that one for a bit.  After pondering that one for a while, I decided what it meant to me.  The only thing that prepares you for death is living.  What prepares you for luck is doing.  “He who does not venture has no luck.”  

Ask yourself, was Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh lucky to complete his transatlantic crossing at the age of 25?  I’d say he was lucky—In the years between the age of 20 when he began to fly and age 25, when he flew to Paris, he had crashed at least five times.  Three times he had to bail out to save himself.  But his transatlantic flight would never have happened if he had not been flying for years, developing, in his words, “his focus and goal orientation, and growing into a resourceful and skilled aviator.”  When luck found Charles Lindbergh, he was prepared.

So, the Second Law of Luck, your luck will be better if you have worked and prepared instead of just waited for it. 

There are religious traditions like Catholicism and Buddhism that hold the unexplained phenomena are attributable, not to luck, but to providence, or karma.  I don’t know.

My view is luck happens.  There are things that happen, regardless of merit or belief, that are not explainable otherwise.  The best term for that is luck.  A renowned physicist was asked if he really believed that his hanging a horseshoe above the door of his house would bring him good luck.  His response—“Of course not, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not.”  Ah, but if luck is going to come our way whether we believe it or not, why not depend on it, leaving it all to chance? 

Depending on luck to carry you all the time simply because it has carried you this far is a mistake.  I tend to agree with the man who said, “Luck always seems to be against the man who depends on it.”  Look at the real estate market, and all those speculators and those sub-prime loans.  For umpteen years median prices for homes went straight up. Homeowners are lucky, huh?  Tell that to the 16 million people who had borrowed more than they could afford to repay, and wound up in foreclosure over the past five years.  Simply put, the Third Law of Luck is--luck happens, but it is not reliable.

Nothing is permanent.  Especially luck, which leads me to one final proverb “Luck is never given, it is always loaned.”  

Questions

A man I worked with for more than a dozen years dropped dead this morning.  I don't know why.  He's had a traveling job for a number of years, just like I did.  They found him on the floor next to the treadmill at a hotel far from home.  Why there and not at home?  He had been taking better care of himself than I did in those years, I was rarely in the exercise room at any hotel until the past three years or so.  Oddly enough, given the time zones, I may have been on a treadmill measuring my heart rate as his was giving out on him across the country.  

He was probably ten years younger than I am, but he never got the chance to retire (I remember his toasting my retirement just a few months ago).   Nor did he get the chance to settle down and stay off the airplanes, out of the hotel rooms and drive his own car for even a whole month in its entirety.  Certainly he hadn't done that in the past ten years.  Instead, he was on the go until his last day.  What was all that rushing around for?

He had several children, grown sons I know, graduates of the one or more of the service academies, serving their country even this morning.  As far as I know, he had not yet met a grandchild.  What was the hurry?  A few more years and he could have had those things.

When I think of what I have enjoyed that he will miss, I am at a loss to understand it all.  What do we do with this?  He was a fine man, and deserved the chance to get up tomorrow and watch the rain, hear music, tell a joke, kiss his wife, take a walk, call his sons, offer a kind word to a friend, help a neighbor, write a letter, breathe, laugh and smile.  Why not? We all did today and probably can tomorrow. 

The answer is no closer for me than it was when I sat down to share this, but I have an idea of a few things I will do tomorrow.  So long, Bruce.   God bless you.  

I'm Changing My Brain

That's it.  I'm doing it.  You can put up with just so much in this life.  This brain of mine has been telling me what to do, or, worse yet, what I should have done, long enough.  "You should have done this, not that..."  It's always asking questions, too.  "Why did you say that?  Why didn't you do this?"  Come to think of it, my brain mostly offers hindsight, anyway.  If it is so smart, predicting some of this would have been helpful.  But no, all it offers is hindsight.  I guess that's normal, but still...  

And bossy?  Let's not even go there.  Every little thing I do, my brain has to be in on it.  I can't move a muscle without it.  Even the things I do unconsciously, without thinking, the brain takes credit for.  "Oh, that's your unconscious brain that controls that..."  Now, at this stage of my life, it's starting to show some wear and tear.  It doesn't remember things like names or words that I have to grope for.  It's way slower than it once was.  It fails to perform simple tasks or even hold still like it should.  So, when I heard a neuroscientist talking the other day about changing your brain, I made up my mind.  

No, it's not like changing your clothes, or changing the batteries in your flashlight.  This one will take a while.  It's not a transplant either.   I don't think anyone would know where or even how to hook up the wires for that one.  It will, however, involve something like rewiring.  It will mean creating new circuitry to replace some that has stopped functioning the way it should.   I know, I know, some of you probably believe mine never has functioned normally.  Normal is overrated anyway.

So, how do you change your brain?  We're learning from mice and monkeys.  Well, not exactly.  It seems experiments being performed on mice and monkeys are teaching us about how brains can be changed.  Somewhere, there is probably someone fretting over what was being done to mice and monkeys, but I'm not.  We wouldn't know half of what we do today about ourselves without animal experiments.  Until recently, changing the circuitry in the brain seemed out of reach.      

But, contrary to what science believed for centuries, you can change your brain.  There are also people who believe this can be accomplished just by thinking about it.  Count me among the skeptics on that one, it seems too much like wishful thinking.  But back to changing your brain--for centuries, scientists believed the brain was a machine, one that had miraculous capability, but a machine nonetheless.  The notion of brain as machine included certain assumptions about how the brain worked or works.  Among them, the assumption that everyone's brain worked in roughly the same way, in that certain regions of the brain performed certain functions in every brain.  Here's another one--that shortly after the teenage years, the brain stopped producing new cells--there's a notion for you, the pinnacle of brain development occurred when you were a teenager.  Other assumptions included the notion that a brain could not repair itself if it was damaged, say in an accident, or by a stroke.  

But reality finally intruded on this concept of the brain as machine and not a growing, changing organism.  Evidence mounted that some brains changed, grew, moved critical functions that had taken place in regions of the brain lost/damaged in an accident or stroke to another part of the brain entirely.  It was found that exercise had an impact on brain function, although it was proven to last only as long as the exercise regimen.  This view of the brain as malleable seemed to be mostly anecdotal--you'd hear  a story. something miraculous, but where was the proof?  Then behavioral psychologists got in on the act and established that kids (and even seniors) perform better when they have regular exercise.  Kids' scores on standardized tests increase when they have regular exercise.  People are even thinking about having two daily recesses in school (I think the teachers will probably put a stop to that--too much playground duty).  Seniors dealing with memory issues improve their performance when they begin an exercise program.  

And now, there is neuroscience that establishes that animals change the circuitry in their brains with vigorous aerobic exercise.  I am in need of new circuitry (come on, aren't we all?).  It turns out the requirement is something like forty-five minutes a day, four or five days a week at 80 to 90% of theoretical maximum heart rate (220 minus your age, times .8 = 80% of theoretical maximum).  That takes some doing.   I spent a couple of hours reading the literature, trying not to choke on the big words, mice and monkeys have created new circuitry in their brains doing this.  If they can do it, I can do it.  I know there is no guarantee these circuits will be better, but the old ones aren't so special these days anyway.  I'd like to stay and talk about this some more, but I'm going to the gym.