Category: Life

Life

Life

Sleep

I was talking to a good friend on Friday about fatigue. One thing you don’t get with small children is any rest. On Saturday we had a day out, buses, boats, trains, ice creams and by the time we got home we were all shattered. A good day though.

I had the same experience with slightly bigger kids at work all last week. Meetings, conversations, communiques and some adult variant tears and tantrums. It all got done and objectively it was a very good and effective week. But…

What’s true of both is I ran my batteries on ‘drain’. A combination of complex emotions at work and simpler but no less demanding ones at home means I’m dog tired.

I have an excuse for a bad night’s sleep on Saturday – next door had a house party. But there’s no excuse for last night. After the clocks going back and two hours of ‘trick or treating’ an early night was what I really needed. But distractions and ‘jobs’ got in the way.

It’s 100% my own fault. I had the diagnosis, I ignored the medicine. Periodic rest and consistent good sleep are the key to happiness, contentment and any sustained attempt at eudaemonia. Note to self, get some.

Death, Life, Work

Time

In this age of austerity, a lot of people are leaving my organisation through voluntary redundancy. Voluntary redundancy can be quite a good way to part company, but inevitably for some when the moment of farewell comes it is hard. Different people deal with it in different ways. Some have a knees up, some have and make speeches. Some slip away quietly, others have a go at the ‘leadership’ which includes me.

I’ve noticed though that some people – especially those who are nearly or over 60 and who have worked for 25 to 30 years for us – get quite frantic. This manifests itself as an incredible drive to get things ‘fixed’ before they leave. This can be their overall legacy, a last piece of work or sometimes just a detail they feel they can’t rest until they’ve sorted. It reminds me of the ‘nesting’ stuff we did before our first child was born – objectively you need to focus on the big change coming in your life, but instead you fuss about cot sheets, wallpaper and in our case finishing building the kitchen.

I was talking to a thoughtful and clever person at work about this today and I advanced my emergent theory of the ‘sands of time double whammy’. I believe our brains are Bayesian probability engines. Everything we do, see and think in some way gets incorporated into our brain so that we act and react based on a quasi-instinctive, but highly tuned estimation of the ‘thing to do’ in any situation based on the vast experience dataset we carry in our heads. So why the ‘double whammy’?

My theory (constructed in a thoroughly Bayesian fashion through a blend of unremembered facts, data, experience and sources) is that our perception of time over duration is relative – and related to how long we’ve been alive. My thesis is that the reason summer holidays seemed endless when I was little is bacause 6 weeks when you’ve only lived a few hundred weeks is a significant proportion of your total life. 6 weeks when you’ve lived several thousand weeks is much less – hence it feels like it passes faster.

Of course we could argue about the stimuli, as an adult you’re busier as a child you have days and days doing the same things. But it seems to me – and I’ve observed in others – as you age the passage of time accelerates. A Bayesian brain which logs everything is hardly going to ignore hard earned experience so new experiences and today must compete for salience with old and the many yesterdays.

That’s half the ‘whammy’. The other half is the ‘sands of time problem’. At 40 something I can still reassure myself I have a good chance of living as long again as I have lived so far. A good chance. But I know that’s becoming increasingly untenable. Within the next 5 years the odds of doubling my life so far will diminish rapidly.

So how will I feel when I am nearly 60, potentially leaving a life’s work, time running faster and faster and the end looming closer and closer? As I said to two different people today, come find me with a gun and shoot me if I’m still working flat out in an Executive job when I’m in my middle fifties.

Not that I’d be too old, just that my days will be racing away and the sands of my time pouring through my hourglass. If I’m still trying to please my boss, make my end of year targets and conjure up another organisation change I need to move on and get a life before the end of life gets me.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Work

Anger

Last weekend I had a ‘falling out’ at work on my mind. Someone had confronted me and asked to come to an important board meeting and I’d said No. The following morning the person stormed in and accused me of being irascible and aggressive before storming out and slamming the door. I was surprised, hurt and sad.

It so happened last weekend I had some time to kill on a train. So while brooding I read a bit of Aristotle’s ethics on the topic of anger. In general my temper is slow to rise. I can soak up a lot and am quite stoical but then when it (unusually) snaps I can say hurtful things, sometimes clinically hurtful, which I regret, often for a long time.

One of the things I’ve tried to do – and having kids has helped with this – is to connect a bit more with my emotions. Part of this involves getting cross more readily but less severely and responding better ‘in the moment’ rather than bottling things up, brooding or dishing up verbal vengeance. Aristotle would approve. For him to be too slow to anger was as much a defect as to be too quick. The ‘golden mean’ of ‘appropriate’ and ‘fitting’ behaviour is what he is all about.

When I lived in France in the 1990s, shouting, being rude and saying what you thought was a normal part of French office life. I remember the first time after extreme provocation that I lost it with someone thinking “That’s it, game over, one of us will have to resign”. The next day the guy I’d had a shouting match with greeted me like a long lost brother and shook me warmly by the hand. It was as if at last he felt he could work with and trust me now we’d had a stand up row. In my experience the ‘golden mean’ for anger in France is very different to that in the UK – just look at their street protests…

So why did I feel so bad about my spat the other week? Partly because the person I’d said ‘no’ to sharply had felt hurt by it. I was also, in truth, worried in case it turned into a grievance or an HR problem. But most of all I was worried that maybe I was out of line, and I had been aggressive, although it hadn’t felt like it at the time. Cue Aristotle for a soothing intellectual balm from 2500 years ago:

“At any given time it is possible to praise someone who seems deficient in anger, and at another praise someone who is excessively angry. There is no simple formula to determine how a man should act in a given situation or how far he can err before he is considered at fault. This difficulty of definition is inherent in all cases of perception. Questions of degree are bound up in the circumstances of particular cases. The solution in every case rests on one’s own moral sensibility. But this much is clear: in all areas of human conduct the mean is the most desirable and its attainment is the source of all moral virtue.”

I felt better for reading that. On Monday I went to talk to my accuser. I explained how the incident and subsequent exchanges had made me feel, I shared some context on the situation, my response and the history of previous board meetings. The result was a rapprochement and reconciliation. I achieved conciliation without contrition.

I’m still left with a question though: what is the golden mean for anger in the modern workplace. I remember coming back the the UK after 5 years of working in France and quite missing their candour and frankness. Sometimes people were really rude, but problems got sorted and people said what they thought.

Perhaps a bit more honest emotion in UK workplaces might be a good thing. I’m trying to show more – and feel more – these days, and it seems to work more often than not, but it’s important to be governed by the ‘golden mean’.

Life

Eels

I was talking to my partner yesterday about our kids and particularly my daughter. We’re looking at schools and some of them are very selective. We were discussing whether our kids are ‘bright’ or not. We both feel confident they are. But where we differ is I believe our kids are the brightest kids in the world.

Of course objectively I accept there may be other kids who write better, do maths better or ride a bike better for their age. But my point is, taken as a whole, I simply believe our kids are the brightest kids in the whole world. They may be equalled but will never be bettered.

Although she is somewhat attracted to this unconditional belief, my partner made two points: where’s your evidence and how will you deal with other kids doing better than them? These are good questions.

My evidence is stronger for my daughter. She’s older. First she reminds me of a scene in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It’s the one where Veruca Salt wants one of the squirrels that tests the nuts to see if they are bad or not. My daughter is like one of those squirrels: bright eyes, hyper-alert, misses nothing, quick, nimble, dextrous and perfectly capable of spotting a bad nut. She has a ‘quickness’ of mind, body and hands which for me is one of the marks of being ‘bright’ whatever it truly means.

On the second point of set-backs and being beaten or failing, I’m sanguine. I expect to fall out with her on homework etc – I already do and I did with my parents. Only time will tell whether her quickness and brightness will translate into conventional academic achievement but…

…as I said to my partner with a little bit of exasperation and the inarticulacy that comes with emotion, she – and I think my son too – are like eels in a tank.

I read in the National Geographic a few weeks back that however you try you can’t keep eels in a fishtank. They will bust the cover, bloody themselves and always get out. Their restless energy cannot be tamed.

I believe my daughter is the same. A duff grade, a school which doesn’t select her, a skill she struggles to master won’t matter – like an eel she has the quickness of mind to bust out of any tank. She’s the brightest kid I know, and I know she’s going to do just fine.

PS: As I write this my little eel is forging up her lane in a swimming pool as her front crawl finally starts to come together. She makes me smile.

Death, Life

Heart

With a heavy heart my partner and I agreed today that we would have our old retired racing greyhound put to sleep next Tuesday morning. He has a tumour which has grown to the size of a half football on his side which hasn’t bothered him much until now. But he’s in pain today, I can see it.

I spent the day with my son, who’s very small, but quite wise for one so little. We took a bus, a train, a boat and a taxi and then went out for a scoot together. Two nights ago he asked me if I would die. I didn’t really know what to say. I put my hand on his chest and said I will live a long long time and that we all live on through the people we love. His hand rested on top of mine sandwiching my hand on top of his little pumping heart. Since then he’s raised the topic of dying several times with me. Tonight we decided we would both live forever and this made him happy. I can save the truth for a bit.

I was talking on Friday to a friend who lost his father quite quickly and painfully. His demise hadn’t been a good one – messed about and messed up by the health service. His mother has developed a heart condition in the process. This got us talking about cardiac coherence – a concept I picked up in David Servan-Schreiber’s book Healing without Freud or Prozac. Cardiac coherence is when the physiological systems which accelerate your heart are perfectly balanced with those which brake it – you are in balance and your immune system is fully optimized.

He writes about a boy and his dog who happened by his lab and for fun they tested for cardiac coherence. Sure enough when the boy and his dog were together the electrocardiogram showed each of them to be in the state of chaotic balance which is cardiac coherence. When they were moved apart they kept a healthy heart rate but came out of coherence. Brought back together and the coherence returned.

I’m not sure my dog ever did that for me. He’s a lovely old chap, but he doesn’t bring me inner peace. One person that does though is my little boy. Like the boy and his dog, I have become aware that simply being physically close to him often swings my heart slowly but surely into perfect coherence – I am happy, at peace and have a full heart.